* * THE OPERA
PAST AND PRESENT *
BY W-F- APTHORP
;
The Music Lover's Library
WAGNER.
The Music Lover's Library
The Opera
Past and Present
An Historical Sketch
By
William Foster Apthorp
Author of " Musicians and Music-Lovers? Etc.
With Portraits
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK :::::::::::::::::::: 1910
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
63 824
EDWARD JOHNSON
MU5!O LIBRARY
Copyright, 1901, by
Charles Scnimer's Sons
TO
B. J. LANG
PrefS
ace
FOR a History of Opera covering, as it
does, over three centuries in four countries
to be brought within the compass of a volume
like this, it must be either one of two things :
something little better than a time-table, an an-
notated list of names and dates, or else a com-
pendious sketch. The former plan might be
excusably followed in a school text - book ;
though some grave doubts of its advisability
might be entertained, even there. But, in a
book that hopes to be read otherwise than
under compulsion, it would be a self-stultifying
impertinence. The other plan, of making the
History a compendious sketch, is the only one
to the purpose.
In writing the present Historical Sketch of
the Opera, I have thrown the whole weight of
my endeavour upon giving a clear and con-
nected account of the first establishment and
gradual evolution of this form of art, and upon
vii
Preface
pointing out the general quasi-philosophical
rationale of the same. I have, accordingly, con-
sidered different schools, composers and works
far more with reference to the influence ex-
erted by them in furthering, or retarding, this
evolution than to their intrinsic excellence. I
have let the historical scythe swing high, cut-
ting off only the most significant heads ; and
the most significant have not always been those
the world calls greatest.
Only in two instances have I departed from
this general plan : in the cases of Mozart and
Beethoven. The puissant genius of these men
was too closely in harmony with the funda-
mental idea of the Opera for them to be negli-
gible, although they exerted infinitely little in-
fluence upon either their contemporaries or
their successors in this field of composition.
Of two other men, again, Alessandro Scarlatti
and Handel, I have said extremely, perhaps
surprisingly, little. Though the greatness of
their genius is beyond doubt, the part they
played in the history of Opera was at once un-
important and, as far as it went, antagonistic to
the real evolution of the form.
Far too much importance has, it seems to me,
been hitherto attributed to Scarlatti, as what
viii
Preface
may be called an evolutionary force in Opera.
He merely propagated the influence of Gia-
como Carissimi as it had been transmitted
to the seventeenth-century Venetians through
Marc' Antonio Cesti, and through the Vene-
tians to Francesco Provenzale in Naples. It
may even be doubted whether the title of
" Founder of the Neapolitan School," so often
bestowed upon Scarlatti, do not properly be-
long to Provenzale. And it may be well to say
here, by the way of Scarlatti's continuing the
Carissimi influence, tljat Remain Holland
seems to have dealt rather a severe blow to the
legend that he was Carissimi's pupil, in esta-
blishing the fact that he studied under Proven-
zale a man of extraordinary genius, whom
Rolland may fairly be said to have redisco-
vered for the benefit of a too forgetful world.
For forty-six years Carissimi had been living
without intermission in Rome, as Maestro di
cappella at S. Apollinare, when he died there
in 1674 ; Scarlatti was born only fifteen years
before this, in 1659, at Trapani in Sicily. The
proximity of these dates, and the distance
between the two places, make it at least im-
probable that the one man ever studied under
the other ; at most, Scarlatti could only have
ix
Preface
begun his education under Carissimi. Fur.
thermore, the hypothesis of his having been
Carissimi's pupil is not needed to account for
his spreading that master's influence ; for this
influence was already the dominant one over
Opera when Scarlatti first came upon the field.
He may have transferred a remaining musical
form or two, which had been established by
Carissimi, from the Oratorio to the Opera ; but
such transfers had been made so copiously by
his Venetian predecessors, that not much, if
anything, can have been left for him to do in
that line.
Succinctly stated, the main object of the
present volume is this : To show how a ge-
neral desire for some such form of dramatico-
lyric art as the Opera was manifested in France
and Italy considerably before any possibility
existed of its coming into actual being ; how
this possibility was at last realized by the de-
vising of a style of artistic monodic composi-
tion by the Florentine Music Reform, and how
the Opera itself was among the first practical
results of that Reform. That the theoretical
principles in accordance with which the Opera
was first established in Florence, in 1595, were
essentially identical with those promulgated in
Preface
the nineteenth century by Richard Wagner.
That the Opera was first diverted from its
original artistic purpose through the influence
of Carissimi, and, from being an essentially dra-
matic and scenic form of art, became a purely
musical one. And finally, how this Carissimi
influence continued to make itself felt, even
through and in spite of the Gluck reaction
against it, until Wagner at last gave it its
death-blow.
In telling the story of this long warfare be-
tween two opposite principles, the original
Florentine dramatic one, and the Carissimi
anti-dramatic, I have, with the two exceptions
mentioned above, considered only such men as
took a prominent active part in the fight, and
more especially such as fought on the dramatic
side. For the history of this conflict is real-
ly the history of Opera. Looked at from this
point of view, some of the greatest geniuses,
like Scarlatti, and even Handel himself, who
had it all their own way, their party being so
much in the ascendant at the time that there
was virtually no opposition, are seen to be of
less importance than, say, a man like Rossini,
who, after arrogantly fighting on the wrong
side when he ought to have known (and did
Preface
know) better, gave at least one mighty blow
for the right, or even a mediocrity like
Giovanni Pacini, who, in his mild way, did
some fighting in the good cause. Of the men
who dealt no blows on either side, or whose
feeble strokes left no mark, nothing has been
said.
I should perhaps say a word or two in ex-
planation of my dwelling so almost exclusively
upon the tragic, or " high-romantic " forms of
Opera, and saying so little about the comic. I
had two reasons for this. In the first place, the
comic forms opera buffa, optra-comique, Sing-
spiel have everywhere been the distinctly na-
tional ones throughout ; the tragic, or romantic
forms, opera seria, trage'die-lyrique, and Grand
Opera in general, the more universal, the more
cosmopolitan. Then, the influence of the comic
forms upon the development of the tragic, or
romantic, has been generally but slight ; where-
as the converse influence has often been very
noteworthy. And I have taken the more in-
fluential and cosmopolitan forms as the more
important.
For a similar reason I have omitted all con-
sideration of the development of the Opera
outside of Italy, France, Germany, and Eng-
xii
Preface
land. What developments it has had in Spain,
Scandinavia, Russia, Hungary, or Bohemia
have had no influence whatever upon the rest
of the world. What these countries have done
in Opera has, it is true, often reflected foreign
influences, but has not exerted any frontier-
crossing influence of its own in return. Per-
haps, on this principle, all reference to Opera
in England might have been omitted as well ;
but we are Anglo - Saxons, and the subject
touches us more near.
I wish to express my deep obligation to the
admirable articles on Monteverdi and Marco da
Gagliano by E. VOGEL in the Leipzig Viertel-
jahrsschrift fiir Musikwissenschaft (Vols. III.
and V.), to the article in the same publication
(Vol. VIII.) on Die venezianische Oper und die
Werke Cavaltis und Cestts by HERMANN
KRETZSCHMAR, and to ROMAIN ROLLAND'S Les
origines du thtdtre lyrique moderne ; histoire de
V Optra en Europe avant Lully et Scarlatti (Paris,
1895) for a great deal in the first two chapters
of this volume. Vogel's and Rolland's careful
and energetic research has, indeed, consider-
ably topsy - turvied previous histories of the
Florentine and Venetian periods of the Opera.
For the rest of the volume, I have relied,
xiii
Preface
partly upon older standard authorities, but
mainly upon my own investigations especially
in the matter of criticism.
W. F.A.
BOSTON, December 13, 1900.
xiv
Contents
Page
I. Beginnings 3
II. The European Conquest 23
III. Cluck 54
IV. Mozart 73
V. The Italians 92
VI. The French Scnool . , 113
VII. The Germans 134
VIII. Wagner 153
IX. The Development of the Art of the Opera-
Singer 180
X. The Present 193
APPENDIX :
Peri's Preface to Euridice . , . ... 221
Gluck's Preface to Alceste 227
Portraits
Lully .... . .
Cluck . . . . .
FACING
PAGE
. . 46
. 60
Mozart . . * . . .
. , 76
Rossini . . . . .
. . 98
Verdi ...
. 108
Meyerbeer . .
. . 126
Weber ......
. 150
THE OPERA
Past and Present
A truly princely spectacle, and delightful beyond all others,
being one in which are combined all the most noble oblectations,
such as contrivance and interest of plot, diction, s yle, mellifluous
rhyme, musical art, the concert of voices and instruments, excel-
lency in singing, grace in dancing and gesture ; and it may also
be said that painting plays therein no unimportant part, in the
matters of scenery and costume ; so that the intellect and every
noblest sentiment are fascinated at one and the same moment by
the most delectable arts ever devised by human genius.
MARCO DA GAGLIANO, Preface to Dafne.
I
Beginnings
LET us take the Egyptians and Assyrians for
granted ; enough that the consociation of
the arts of Poetry, Music, and Dancing in the
Drama dates back at least to Thespis's cart.
How intimate the union of these three arts
may have been in the classic Greek Drama,
and its later Roman imitation, is a question
little to our present purpose ; for, though all
three still had a place in what remained of the
Drama in the Middle Ages, they were bound
together by no intimate bond of union. Of that,
so to speak, " chemical " union of this clover-
leaf of arts, of that mutually helpful cooperation
toward a common dramatic end, which is the
essence of Opera, nothing was to be found.
And, as just this cooperative union is the es-
sence of Opera, as a special form of dramatic
art, it is evident that the Opera could not come
into being until such an union had been estab-
lished, or supposing it really to have existed
in the old Greek Drama re-established.
The Opera Past and Present
A drama with incidental music is not an
opera ; such dramas were not uncommon long
before anything like Opera was known. The
type of Drama which we now know as vaude-
ville a play interspersed with songs is to be
recognized in the old French satire-plays and
dramatic pastorals. A noteworthy example is
Adam de la Halle's Li gieus de Robin et de Ma-
rion, given at the court of Charles d'Artois in
Naples, probably in 1285. This little pastoral
play was long looked upon as the first opera in
history, and the trouvere Adam de la Halle,
as the first opera-composer. Unluckily for this
time-honoured distinction, recent research has
proved beyond a doubt that neither the music
nor the text of the songs was written by Adam,
but only the connecting dialogue. As was the
fashion of the day, he took a certain number of
popular ballads, constructed a dramatic story
out of them, and bound them together into a
play with spoken dialogue of his own invention.
The thing can not be called an opera, but, at the
very most, an operatic symptom. Neither was
it the first nor last of its kind.
That playwrights and musicians especially
the latter had a vague premonition of some-
thing like Opera long before they had the means
of writing one, is more than likely. What may
be called premonitory symptoms of Opera were
4
Beginnings
not uncommon in the musical and dramatic
life of the Middle Ages and the earlier Renais-
sance period ; they became especially recogniz-
able as symptomatic about the middle of the
sixteenth century, both in France and Italy.
One finds a distinct yearning after Opera, and
manifold attempts to create something as nearly
like it as possible. Furthermore, some of these
attempts show plainly, not only a desire on the
part of musicians to do something operatic,
but also a total lack of adequate means of satis-
fying this desire at the time.
Leaving the Art of Dancing out of considera-
tion, for the moment, as of secondary theoretic
importance, we can see that nothing like Opera
was possible, so long as the Art of Music was
in no condition to fulfil, not only certain dra-
matic, but also (and more especially) certain
scenic requirements. Such scenic requirements
were, to be sure, fulfilled to some extent by the
folk-song or popular ballad ; but this form of
music, as then practised, had no dramatic cha-
racter. Moreover, the folk-song lay outside the
then domain of what would be called artistic
composition ; technically well-trained musicians
who had an ambition to be recognized as com-
posers would have nothing to do with it ; at
best, they would take a folk-song, as they would
a Gregorian chaunt, as material to be worked
5
The Opera Past and Present
up in strict counterpoint which latter was
the only form of soi-disant " artistic " composi-
tion known at the time. And counterpoint
was essentially polyphonic in several inter-
woven voices, or parts and, as such, abso-
lutely unfit for all but an exceedingly limited
range of scenic uses. In a composition for the
concert-room a polyphonic or choral passage
may, at a pinch, stand for the utterance of a
single individual ; * but it can not do so on the
dramatic stage. A single actor can not sing in
four or five parts (" real" or otherwise), and to
put a visible quartet or quintet of singers upon
the stage, to impersonate a single individual,
would be a slap in the face of dramatic realism
against which even the most imaginatively dis-
posed audience would protest.
So composers who wished to write dramatic
music counterpoint being the only known
medium had perforce to forego actual drama-
tic representation of their works, and content
themselves with performances in the concert-
room. But let no one think contrapuntal po-
lyphony an impossible vehicle for dramatic ex-
pression. True, strict vocal counterpoint in
the old modal system, quite devoid of sighing
* Modern instances of this sort of thing are not wanting. Men-
delssohn, in his Paulus, makes the Lord speak in a four-part
chorus of female voices.
6
Beginnings
or yearning chromatics, does not seem a very
poignantly expressive medium to us now ; but
there resided in it at least some expressive
potentialities, which the then composers were
eager to make the most of ; in any case, the
will was not wanting. Indeed, an ever-grow-
ing tendency to lay stress upon the intentional
expression of definite emotion is noticeable in
the great contrapuntists of the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries, from old Josquin Despr6s
(1450-1521) down; and from the emotionally
expressive to the dramatic is but a step.
The early madrigal-plays what we should
call dramatic cantatas in France and Italy
were really far more significant operatic sym-
ptoms than the older stage-plays of the Robin
et Marion sort, even though these latter were
given with scenery, costumes, and dramatic
action on a real stage. Although written for
the concert-room, the madrigal-plays showed a
distinct striving on the part of composers to do
something more dramatic with music than had
been done theretofore, which the vaudeville -\^&&
stage-plays did not in the least.
It is noteworthy that, especially in Italy,
these madrigal-plays generally took a comic
direction. Alessandro Striggio of Mantua
(* 535" 1 584) writes a series of rustic scenes for
four and five voices, carrying the listener
7
The Opera Past and Present
through the various occurrences of a village
day : scenes of village gossip and scandal, ser-
vants' complaints of their masters, bickerings
and hand-to-hand fight of washerwomen, re-
conciliation, kisses, and sunset. Giovanni Croce
of Chioggia (1550-1609) sets the whole Vene-
tian carnival to music, often with no little real-
istic vis comica. At last we come to the comic
cantatas of Orazio Vecchi of Modena (1551-
1605) and his pupil, Adriano Banchieri of Bo-
logna (1567-1634). These were sung on the
stage by costumed singers ; the text was a regu-
lar play, but there was no acting, and the music
of each dramatis persona was for from three to
five voices, quite in the traditional contrapun-
tal madrigal style, but often overbrimming
with picturesque suggestiveness and comic
realism. These cantatas represent the dra-
matic culmination of the old modal coun-
terpoint, the last stage of the preliminary evo-
lution which preceded the advent of Opera in
Italy.
Equally symptomatic, if in a different way,
were some of the developments of the court
ballet in France under the Valois. The ballet,
as in favour at the French court about the mid-
dle of the sixteenth century, was essentially
what we should now call a ballet d* action; it
was based on some timely theme, generally of
8
Beginnings
a classico-mythological character, and this cen-
tral idea was developed in recited verses, songs,
choruses, dancing, and pantomime, often with
the aid of very ingenious stage-machinery. The
scheme was artless enough, the thing had little
dramatic consistency ; but the elements of po-
etry, music, dancing, and dramatic action were
here associated together, and the bond of
union between all four was not so loose but
that a light touch of the magician's wand would
suffice to turn the whole thing into Opera. The
eye of History even descries something very
like that magician in Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx,
a Piedmontese violinist his real name was
Baltazarini who came to Paris with a company
of Italian fiddlers in 1577, being recommended
by the mar6chal de Brissac to Catherine de
Medicis ; she made him her valet de chambre.
This Beaujoyeulx associated with himself se-
veral court poets, musicians, and painters* in
organizing a grand ballet called Circf, ou le bal-
let comique de la Reme, which was given by
Henri III in the salle des cariatides of the
palais du Petit-Bourbon on Sunday, October
15, 1581, in honour of the marriage of the due
de Joyeuse and Marguerite de Vaudemont de
* La Chesnaye, de Beaulieu, Maistre Salmon, Jacques Patin,
Desportes, Baif, Ronsard, and Th. Agrippa d'Aubigne are men-
tioned as having a hand in it.
9
The Opera Past and Present
Lorraine, the queen's sister.* The plot was of
the simplest: a gentleman, hastening to an-
nounce the reign of Peace and Plenty to His
Most Christian Majesty, is waylaid by Circ6,
and by her changed into a lion. Half the gods
and goddesses of Olympus, not to mention other
mythological personages, try to liberate him,
but either return discomfited to whence they
came, or are likewise transformed into beasts.
At last the Royal Word does the business, and
all ends happily. The whole is interspersed
with harangues, distilling an amount of court
holy-water suggestive of His Most Christian
Majesty's having a fine stomach for adulation,
songs, duets, choruses, instrumental intermez-
zi, and two grand ballet-interludes.f The per-
* BALTHASAR DE BEAUJOYEULX, Balet comyque de la Royne.
Paris : Adrian Le Roy, Ballard et Mamert Pattison, 1582.
BEAUJOYEULX, le Ballet comique de la Reine, etc., reconstitue
et reduit pour piano et chant par J. -B. WECKERLIN. Paris :
Theodore Michaelis, s. d.
A copy of the former (the original full score) is now in the Bibli-
otheque Nationale in Paris ; one of Weckerlin's pianoforte-score is
in the Boston Public Library.
t One little strain of the music has come down to our day : the
last nine measures of ballet-music in the first interlude, taken from
an old song, le Son de la clochette, which, under the name of
Amaryllis, used to be a favourite at Mr. Thomas's concerts in
New York and elsewhere, in an arrangement by one Ghys who
wrongly attributed its composition to Henri III himself. The
song is much older than the last of the Valois.
10
Beginnings
formance was probably the most sumptuous on
record, lasted from ten o'clock in the evening
to a half after three in the morning, " without
anyone's noticing its length," and cost over
1,200,000 tens* The curious reader can find
a detailed account of its scenic splendours of
solid gold, silver, and real gems Circe's Gar-
den, Golden Vault, Grove of Pan, Fountain
of Glaucus, etc. its gorgeously attired court
beauties and professional singers, in Celler.f
The experiment was too expensive to be re-
peated !
What differentiates the Ballet de la Reine from
the many court ballets that preceded it under
the Valois, and followed it under the Bourbons,
is its superior consistency of dramatic plot;
possibly also an occasional dramatic accent in
the music. If not quite a full-fledged opera,
Celler is a little over-anxious to accept it as
one, it was more like an opera than anything
that came before it in France. Call it at least
an " opera in embryo," a noteworthy premoni-
tory symptom of what was to come. As such,
one of the most remarkable things about it was
* If this means silver frus, the sum would be 3,600,000 francs ;
if gold, 6,000,000 francs. Say, from $720,000 to $1,200,000 of
our money.
tLUDOVic CELLER, Les origines de V Optra ct le Ballet de la
Reine. Paris : Didier et Cie., 1868.
II
The Opera Past and Present
the wholly unpremeditated way Baltazarini
stumbled, as it were, upon a style of musico-
dramatic entertainment so very like what
French Opera was destined to become in after
years; this seems to have been, with him, a
matter of pure clairvoyant instinct.
So far had matters been brought forward in
the operatic direction by the last quarter of the
sixteenth century ; all that opera-thirsty mu-
sicians were still waiting for was a form of mu-
sic that could be put to scenic uses. That form
once found, the Opera would come of itself !
About the last decade of the century a coterie
of Florentine nobles made a noteworthy disco-
very. This was virtually that, though the
Renaissance in Art and Literature was hard
upon two centuries old, the Art of Music had
been quite untouched by it. This isolated po-
sition of Music during over a century and a
half of the Renaissance may seem strange, but
was really entirely natural, even unavoidable.
The whole Renaissance movement was essen-
tially a return to the Classic, a setting up of
antique theory and practice as unquestioned
guides in matters of Art and Literature. Now,
it was comparatively easy for the promoters of
the Renaissance to take up Painting, Sculpture,
Architecture, Poetry, and Literature in general
where the ancient Greeks and Romans had left
12
Beginnings
them ; these arts had been lying fallow through
the Middle Ages, utterly neglected ; the thread
could be knotted together again, and the evolu-
tion proceed almost as if there had been no
break. But with Music this was impossible.
The Art of Music had not shared the long
torpid sleep of her sister arts during the Middle
Ages, but, from the tenth century on, had been
pursuing a course of evolution of her own, and,
what is more, a course of evolution almost
wholly uninfluenced by antique precept or ex-
ample. By the time the Renaissance began,
this evolution had made giant strides. So the
promoters of the Renaissance, who found the
other arts lying torpid and, like Rip Van
Winkle, no farther advanced than when they
had first gone to sleep, found Music very wide
awake indeed, with four centuries of formal
evolution already behind her. Moreover, as
this evolution had been hardly influenced at all
by classic principles, it was no wonder that the
art had got into a condition which made classic
precepts utterly inapplicable. The writings of
Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient philosophers
the infallible Bibles of the Renaissance aes-
thetic creed were infinitely instructive about
Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and Poetry ;
but they had nothing whatever to say about
strict vocal counterpoint, the one musical form
13
The Opera Past and Present
which the four centuries of evolution had
brought forth. Counterpoint was clearly irre-
deemably un-Platonic and un-Aristotelian, and
that was the self-evident long and short of it!
That our Florentine friends should have
waked up one fine morning to this damning
fact damning, for to be un-Hellenic was to
be inartistic is not surprising ; it would have
been more astonishing, had they remained
longer blind to it. But, once awake to this
fact, they determined to act upon it forthwith.
They instituted the so-called Florentine Music-
Reform of the seventeenth century a move-
ment of importance in history. The true gist
of this reform was to bring the Art of Music for
the first time under the sway of Renaissance
principles ; it was the Renaissance of the art.
These reformers were Giovanni Bardi, a di-
stinguished Della-Cruscan and member of the
Accademia degl' Alterati ; Piero Strozzi ; Vin-
cenzo Galilei, father of " E pur si muove" ; and
Jacopo Corsi. With these noblemen were
associated Ottavio (or Ottaviano) Rinuccini,
the poet, and two professional musicians :
Jacopo Peri, nicknamed il Zazzerino from his
fine shock of gold-red hair (" bellissima capella-
tura fra bionda e rossa "), and Giulio Caccini,
better known in his day, like his namesake the
painter, as Giulio Romano. The coterie was
'4
Beginnings
collectively known as la Camerata " the
Chamber."*
The Reform was both destructive and con-
structive. Destructively, it was war to the
knife with counterpoint, and with all for which
counterpoint stood. Rather a comprehensive
program, in its way ; as much so as that whole-
sale demand for " T arrest at ion des coquins et des
Idches " in the French National Assembly. For
the abolition of counterpoint meant nothing
more nor less than wiping out the only form of
music then known, and nullifying all the prac-
tical technique in composition that had been
acquired after four centuries of labour. Con-
structively, the Reform meant the devising of
a new form of composition, governed by the
strictest and most uncompromising antique-
Hellenic principles. Music was to do nothing
* The dates of Peri's birth and death are not known ; he was
a Florentine of humble birth, but seems somehow to have per-
suaded himself that he could lay just claim to descent from the
noble family of Peri. Caccini, several years his junior, was born
in Rome between 1558 and 1560; when a young man, he came to
settle in Florence, where he died in 1640. Peri was a very tho-
roughly trained musician, decidedly more so than Caccini, who
was, however, far enough from being the mere bungler some his-
torians have called him. From the beginning, every pioneer in a
new musical direction has been called a poor musician by his
academic contemporaries. Both Caccini and Peri were famous
singers ; Caccini was also noted as a teacher of singing.
15
The Opera Past and Present
but help to express the sentiments of the poetic
text ; it was to take its whole plastic form from
that text from the natural rhetorical accents
of ordinary speech, the natural emotional rise
and fall of the voice, from the metre of the
verse, even from the very rhyme. All so-called
purely musical freedom was to be denied it, it
was to become the docile hand-maid of Poetry.
In other words, an absolute tabula rasa was to
be made of the whole Art of Music.
As a matter of fact, this Florentine Reform
was the dawn of "artistic" monodic composi-
tion for a single voice with instrumental ac-
companiment on principles which the reader
must already have recognized as strictly Wag-
nerian. The style of writing which the Came-
rata thus originated was called the stile rap-
presentativo, or " representative (i.e. expressive)
style " ; something very like what we now call
recitative.
Kind Fortune smiled. What could, for in-
stance, have been luckier we having made a
tabula rasa of the Art of Music than the oppor-
tune publication, in 1592, of Claudio Montever-
di's third book of madrigals, an epoch-making
volume, big with a whole new Tonal System,
with " free dominant /ths " and other luxuries,
unheard-of before? A most fitting novelty for
a new era to begin with ! The point of depart-
16
Beginnings
ure for all Modern Music, did we but know it !
Then, how well our new monodic style, quite
dazzling in its Hellenic purity, fits in with that
other great factor of the Renaissance : the
growth of Individualism in Art. Really the
prime product of the whole Renaissance move-
ment, the wheat, of which our vaunted classi-
cism is but the chaff. For our classicism is, in
the end, but a blind, a manifesto, something to
sign and swear to; but the Individualism is a
natural, instinctive growth, and has more than
the force of signed parchment. Painters and
sculptors have, for the last half century and
more, been forswearing their allegiance to the
classic type, and limning the features of the
woman most after their own heart; poets have
sung what they themselves have seen and felt
and let the Academy go hang. And now we
composers can do likewise in our way : turn
our backs upon the typical generalities of coun-
terpoint, and put our inmost selves into har-
mony and melody. You singers, too, can at
last stand forth from the choir, and be your-
selves alone. Here, if anywhere, is a free field
for Individualism ; pity only that we have no
working technique ready-made for the occa-
sion ; for the old contrapuntal technique will
surely not carry us far on our new road. But
courage ! a technique has been developed once,
17
The Opera Past and Present
and can be developed again. We will enter
upon our new era of the Art of Music with
hearts undaunted, and put our forebears to the
blush yet !
Strange, though, what ideals men in an inter-
esting condition will set up for themselves, and
how little the most ardent players see of the
game. Here was the Camerata with a brand-
new musical style (fondly believed by them to
be authentically antique), eminently adapted to
scenic use. And to what use, think you, did
they purpose putting it ? To a revival of the
Greek Drama, the crowning consummation of
that Hellenic palingenesis which was the proud-
est boast of the Renaissance ! Of all imaginable
projects, probably the most hopeless in Italy
in the last decade of the sixteenth century.
Yet this was what the Camerata were bent upon
bringing about, cost what it might ; and that
they could do it they had never a doubt. That
they did not do it, nor anything like it, need
hardly be said ; they did better, they gave birth
to the Opera. To think that this, of all forms
of art, should owe its existence to a set of as
arrant pedants as ever drew breath ! for that
the members of the Camerata (always excepting
Caccini and Peri) distinctly were, pedants to
the finger-tips.
The first high festival of the new musical cult
18
Beginnings
was the performance of Dafne a favola in mu-
sica, or opera, the libretto by Rinuccini, the
music by Peri at Corsi's palace in 1595. This
was the first opera on record, and so successful
that it was repeated at several successive carni-
vals. It was written in the stile rappresentativo ;
yet hear what Pietro della Valle (a most com-
petent witness) wrote afterwards about the
singing of Vittoria Archilei, who took the part
of Dafne : " She was no beauty, but the fore-
most songstress of the time. She ornamented
the written monody with long flourishes and
turns (lunghi giri e grupfi) which disfigured
it, but were much in fashion, and the singer
Peri praises them highly."* So, at the very
first dawn of Opera did the virtuoso singer
have her share in the business, and have her
" disfiguring" flourishes condoned by the com-
poser! The fact is not without its signifi-
cance, f
The score of Dafne has been lost; all the
performances were in private, before invited
audiences. But the Opera made its official,
public entry into the world five years later.
* In a letter to Lelio Guidiccioni, January 16, 1640 forty and
odd years after the performance ; but some men have tenacious
memories. Note, too, that "the singer Peri" was the composer
himself.
f Vide Peri's preface to Euridice in Appendix, page 221.
19
The Opera Past and Present
By order of the grand duke, Rinuccini wrote
the libretto of Euridice ; it was set to music
separately by both Caccini and Peri, each com-
poser writing his own complete score. The
opera was given, as part of the festivities in
honour of the wedding of Henri IV, of France,
and Maria de' Medici, in the Pitti Palace on
October 6, 1600; at this first performance part
of Peri's music and part of Caccini's were given.
But both scores were published separately.
In Caccini's and Peri's Euridices we have fair
samples of what serious Italian Opera was in its
first estate. There are some few choruses in
the madrigal style ; the dialogue is all carried
on in the stile rappresentativo. But many vocal
flourishes are actually written down, especially
in Caccini's score, so they can not be charged
to any whim of the Archilei, who sang the part
of Euridice, unless, indeed, she exerted some
personal influence over the composers, who,
between pedantic noble patrons, on the one
hand, and an indispensable prima donna, on the
other, may well have had moments of doubt
as to which was the devil and which the deep
sea.
Yet this personal influence, though quite sup-
posable, is not necessary to account for the
flourishes ; it is more than probable that Cac-
cini and Peri would have written them in any
Beginnings
event. They, men of original genius, must
have felt that Music, as the idealizing element
in Opera, ought to be treated with something
of ideality. Now, it happens that the idealiz-
ing power of this mysterious Art of Tones re-
sides in its sensuous beauty of line and colour;
and, owing to the primordial, amorphous con-
dition into which the Reform had thrown
Music, with counterpoint abolished, the or-
chestra merely rudimentary, tonal harmony in
its infancy, and true melody unborn, well-nigh
the only sensuous appeal to the musical ear
they had at command was that of florid vocali-
zation by a beautiful voice. Those long " giri e
gruppi" were the sacrifice they forced the stern
stile rappresentativo to offer up at the altar of
musical beauty and ideality.
Thus was the Opera born : of a determined,
if utterly foolish and futile, attempt to revive
the classic Greek Drama in the last decade of
the sixteenth century in Florence. It entered
upon life with its dramatic side very perfectly
developed, for Rinuccini was distinctly a man
of genius, both as poet and dramatist ; far above
the average of his day, one of the best librettists
ever known, with its musical side in a merely
embryonic condition. Yet the music, in one
respect, quite fulfilled the demands of the most
nineteenth-century aesthetics: in its absolute
21
The Opera Past and Present
subserviency to the emotional expression of the
text, in its thoroughly scenic quality, its allow-
ing the actor the completest practicable free-
dom of dramatic action. In other words, the
Opera began (in theory, at least) as a perfect
exemplification of the art principles of the
Wagnerian Music-Drama ; all that was lack-
ing was a further musical development.*
* Peri's claim to being the Father of the Opera has been dis-
puted. It is known that Emilio del Cavaliere (or de' Cavalieri)
a Roman nobleman (born about 1550, died before 1600) who came
to Florence between 1570 and 1580, and held the post of In-
spector-General of Art and Artists under Ferdinando de' Medici
up to 1596 wrote music to three plays, two of which // Satiro
and La disperazione di Fileno were given on the stage in 1590,
that is, four years before Peri's Dafne. The whole question rests
on the character of the music to these plays, the scores of which
have been lost. Peri plainly refers to them in his preface to
Euridice (vide Appendix), but in a way that is open to more than
one interpretation. The expression "our Music (nostra Musica) "
might be taken to mean the stile rappresentativo of the Camerata ;
but it is known that del Cavaliere had no connection with the
Camerata. Moreover, Peri's subsequent statement that he him-
self (who certainly did write in the stile rappresentativo) had treated
the text " in a different manner (in altra guisa) " contradicts this.
Upon the whole, considering the fashions of the day, may not the
"our Music," as well as the "with marvellous originality," have
been sheer bits of conventional flattery, quite natural for an artist
like Peri to use in referring to a nobleman of del Cavaliere's in-
fluence in Florence, especially as that nobleman, not belonging to
the Camerata, might be well worth propitiating ? In those days
it was difficult to gather a man's real meaning from what he said
in a dedicatory preface.
22
II
The European Conquest
THE first to follow the Florentine lead, and
trump all the Camerata's aces, were Clau-
dio Monteverdi and Marco da Gagliano.*
Monteverdi was born at Cremona in May,
1567, and studied under Marc' Antonio Ingegni-
eri, maestro di cappella at the cathedral. From
1590 to 1612 he was in the service of Vincenzo
Gonzaga, duke of Mantua, at first as singer and
violist, then as maestro di cappella and court com-
* The first composer's name is spelt Monteverdo in the baptis-
mal register. Of the title-pages of most of his published works
it stands as Monteverde ; once as Monte Verde. But the 113 auto-
graph letters that have come down to us are, without exception,
signed Monteverdi. This plural termination is undoubtedly the
right one. Vide VOGEL, Claudio Monteverdi, in Vierteljahrs-
schrift fur Musikwissenschaft, III., 315.
Da Gagliano's name is given wrong in most cyclopaedias. The
error has been traced to F. - J. Fetis, who, seeing ' ' Marco di
Zanobi da Gagliano "in an article by Picchianti in the Gazetta
musicale di Milano (1844, No. i), mistook Zanobi for the family
surname, and the di for a sign of noblesse. Zanobi was the Chris-
tian name of Marco's father, and the family was so far from noble
that its surname has never come to light. Vide Jb. t V.
23
The Opera Past and Present
poser ; from 1613 to his death, on November 29,
1643, he was maestro di cappella at St. Mark's in
Venice. He was one of the greatest geniuses,
probably the very greatest pioneer, in the whole
history of Music. We have already met him as
the discoverer of the modern Tonal System a
discovery which revolutionized the whole Art of
Music; he developed the ponderous, unwieldy
stile rappresentativo of the Camerata, with its
leaden accompaniment in long-sustained notes,
into the more vivacious and passionate stile con-
citato (or " excited style "), letting the accompa-
niment take its own rhythm and strike as many
repeated notes to the measure as he pleased,
thus establishing the basis for nearly all modern
writing for a voice, or voices, with instrumental
accompaniment. This repercussion of notes,
pushed to the due degree of speed, became the
string tremolo a device against which the play-
ers kicked lustily at first, as physically impos-
sible. He also invented the string pizzicato.
The whole great Art of Instrumentation owes
its origin to him. He and da Gagliano carried
the Opera one stage farther in its musical de-
velopment ; not a very long stage, perhaps, but
none the less an important one. They threw
Dramatic Music, already big with Melody, into
her travail -th roes ; the whole dramatic style
showed greater freedom and mastery.
24
The European Conquest
On May 28, 1607, Monteverdi's first opera,
Orfeo (the libretto by Alessandro Striggio), was
given with great success at the Accademia degV
Invaghiti in Mantua. Toward the end of Janu-
ary, 1608, it was followed by da Gagliano's
Dafne (Rinuccini's old libretto, revamped for
the occasion by the author), given in honour of
the duke's youngest son, Ferdinando Gonzaga,
being made cardinal. On May 28 of the same
year came the most overwhelming success of
all, Monteverdi's Arianna (the text by Rinuc-
cini), given to celebrate the nuptials of Fran-
cesco Gonzaga (the eldest son) and Margherita
di Savoia.
In Monteverdi's Orfeo we find Caccini and
Peri left well behind. The monody has more
musical independence, a freer dramatic fire ;
the orchestration begins to assume an impor-
tance of its own ; the harmony is richer and
more appositely expressive ; in short, one feels
a stronger hand at the bellows.* All that re-
mains of Arianna is one monologue, Arianna's
famous lament, " Lasciatemi morire /" after be-
ing abandoned by Teseo. No single composi-
tion was ever more famous in its day than this
Lament o ; contemporary letters are rich in ac-
* It is rather curious that, of all Monteverdi's opera-scores,
only the first and last Orfeo (Mantua, 1607) and L> Incoronatione
di Poppea (Venice, 1642) have been preserved.
25
The Opera Past and Present
counts of its pathetic beauty and of the over-
whelming impression it made upon all listeners.
Even to-day we can feel its enormous dramatic
power, its wondrous truth and depth of pathos.*
So far, the Opera had been distinctly aristo-
cratic, a bonne bouche for cultivated cognoscenti ;
but a change was soon to come. In 1637 the
first public opera-house Teatro di San Cas-
siano f was opened in Venice ; with it, the
Opera was brought for the first time face to
face with the great general public. Thence-
forth the people together with, but quite as
much as, crowned heads and affluent nobles
were to be arbiters of its destiny. And, as Hans
Sachs says,
Wer Preise erkennt, und Preise stellt,
der will am End' auch dass man ihm gefallt.J
That the Opera must come down from its high
perch of pseudo-Hellenic purism, and appeal to
a taste quite other than that of a cultivated
aristocracy, was evident enough.
* It is printed entire, omitting the short choruses between the
stanzas, in VOGEL, ubi sup., 445-450 ; unfortunately the accom-
paniment is given only in figured bass.
t Most Venetian opera-houses were named after the nearest
church.
t Freely Englished: " He who offers and awards prizes likes,
upon the whole, to be pleased in his own way." Die Meister*
singer von Niirnberg, Act III., scene 2.
26
The European Conquest
Accordingly we find, in this Venetian period
of the Lyric Drama, a marked deterioration in
the character of libretti. Classico-mythological
subjects make way for classico-historical ones;
historical only in title and in the names of the
dramatis persona, for the whole social and moral
atmosphere is seventeenth-century Venetian;
high-buskinned Tragedy quits the field, to make
room for the intrigues and loud fustian of Me-
lodrama. Almost the only theme is intrigue :
intrigue amorous, intrigue political, intrigue
villainous; the favourite hinge to the plot is
what the French call travestissement, disguise in
somebody else's clothes ; all the characters, no-
ble or base, virtuous or debauched, patriotic or
traitorous, have, as Romain Rolland acutely
remarks, one trait in common : they invariably
seek to gain their several ends by lying ! Side
by side with the most hair-raising sophistica-
tions of rhetoric and metaphor, we find a naivete
as of Navahoes and Zunis ; for ingenuous ana-
chronisms, these opera-texts put Shakspere to
the blush.* Last, but not least, the comic per-
sonage, the low comedian dear to the gods,
makes his way upon the stage, flouting heroes
* For instance, Praxiteles accompanies Phryne to a "solemn
fair " in Athens, where, after expatiating upon the products of
"Asia, America (sic /), Europe, Africa, and the world," he buys
her a "gold watch."
7
The Opera Past and Present
and demigods with his tart wit. The Opera is
popularizing itself with a vengeance!
And with this popular movement comes suc-
cess ; for, as George Eliot says, " none but the
ancients could be always classic." After the
San Cassiano, opera-house upon opera-house is
opened in Venice ; by the end of the century
there are eleven, of them in full blast a gene-
rous allowance for a population of about 140,000.
What a cultivated aristocracy thought of the
business is not reported ; but it probably did
not kick over-hard, and may, in its heart of
heart, have been not disinclined to welcome a
respite from being " always classic." But that
impressive spectre of a revived Greek Drama
was sent back to limbo for good and all ! Upon
the whole, whatever the Opera may have lost in
dignity by thus tumbling down from its aris-
tocratic-classical perch, it certainly gained in
vigour and pithiness by becoming a frank ex-
pression of the Spirit of the Age.
The ruling individuality of this whole Vene-
tian period of the Opera was Monteverdi's
greatest pupil, Cavalli. Pier-Francesco Caletti-
Bruni was born at Crema, near Venice, in 1599
or 1600 ; his father was maestro di cappella at the
church of Sta. Maria in Crema. He was taken
to Venice by Federigo Cavalli, a Venetian no-
bleman and podesta of the province of Crema,
28
The European Conquest
who lodged him in his own house and had him
educated as a musician. The boy was soon
popularly known as il Checo di Cd-Cavalli
(Franky of the house of Cavalli), and his real
name was gradually dropped. As composer,
as organist (1665) and maestro di cappella (1668)
at St. Mark's, he was always known as Fran-
cesco Cavalli.
Cavalli's was a rugged, passionate, wholly
masculine nature ; with a lightning-flash of in-
stinct he would dive to the bottom of a dra-
matic situation, and, without any reflective pro-
cess, crystallise out its gist in a few measures of
matchless music. He was* fond of rapid, bril-
liant strokes, hitting the nail upon the head and
driving it home at a blow. There is some-
thing Wagnerish in the heroic pomp of his
style, in the laconic pithiness of an occasional
trumpet-like theme; more Wagnerish still is his
glowing picturesque imaginativeness. He for
the first time brought something of the popular
song into Opera ; his fondness for simple, con-
cise melodic forms is conspicuous. He wel-
comed the laughable personage upon the lyric
stage, and treated him musically with consum-
mate mastery. A born son of the people, he
was just the man to give convincing expression
to the popular spirit.
Of Cavalli's thirty-nine operas, the first, Le
29
The Opera Past and Present
nozze di Teti e Peleo, was brought out at the San
Cassiano in 1639; the last, a second version of
Erismena, at the San Salvatore in 1670. His
best and most famous works were probably
Giasone (San Cassiano, 1649) an d Ercole (Paris,
1662). He died in Venice on January 14, 1676.
The introduction of the comic element into
Opera which may be roughly dated with
Cavalli's Doriclea (San Cassiano, 1645) was one
of the most noteworthy features of the earlier
part of the Venetian movement; it was, in the
best sense, popular. Another innovation was
less good : the gradual discarding of the chorus
probably chiefly for financial reasons, the sala-
ries of leading artists having much increased
since the first opera-houses were opened. In
other parts of Italy the comic and satirical
Opera flourished almost to the exclusion of the
more serious form. The opera buffa was fast
coming into vogue. Nowhere, save in Mantua
(and at first in Venice), was the ultra-classicism
of the Camerata accepted ; either the purely
comic and satirical variety was taken as the
standard norm, or else the mixed serio-comic
one, as developed in Venice by Cavalli. Espe-
cially in Naples was this latter cultivated, with
both the comic and the melodramatic elements
pushed to artless exaggeration.
The chief figure in the, so to speak, preli-
The European Conquest
minary period of Opera in Naples before the
more characteristic " great " (or " beautiful ")
Neapolitan period was Francesco Provenzale,
one of the greatest and most forgotten geniuses
in the history of Opera, suspected by Remain
Rolland to be identical with the better-known
Francesco della Torre. He was born about
1610, and died no one knows when. His La
Stellidaura vendicata (1670), // schiavo di sua
moglie (1671), and if Holland's suspicion is
right Alessandro Bala (1678) show him to have
been a consummate master of the serio-comic
style, with, however, a strong leaning toward
the tragic.
If the Venetian movement could but have
continued longer in its original direction, the
whole subsequent history of Opera might have
been different ; the form might gradually have
outgrown its melodramatic frivolities, and
have become in time the highest and most na-
tural sort of Lyric Drama. But this was not
to be ; a new element was suddenly introduced,
which straightway, and all but permanently,
changed the whole face of the matter.
Up to about the middle of Cavalli's career,
the whole progressive development of the
Opera had been of the musical sort ; consider-
ing the dramatic perfection and musical pri-
mitiveness of the form in its first estate, under
31
The Opera Past and Present
the Florentine Camerata, this was inevitable.
But, as Mr. Runciman well says, no one learns
how to do a thing best by trying to do some-
thing else ; it is easy to see how a new musical
evolution could be pushed forward more free-
ly and rapidly by composers who did not write
for the stage than by opera-writers who were
unavoidably hampered by scenic considerations.
To make Music musical is one thing ; to make
it musical and scenic at the same time is a
double task. No wonder, then, that the un-
dramatic composers soon outstripped their
opera- writing contemporaries.
Giacomo Carissimi (born at Marino, near
Rome, about 1604, died in Rome in 1674), un-
questionably the greatest genius of his time in
Music, had done mighty work in developing
the Oratorio. Indeed, this wonderful man did
virtually the work of a whole century in the
matter of formal musical evolution ; he devel-
oped and established wellnigh every form of
vocal composition cultivated in Bach's and
Handel's day. He never wrote for the stage ;
and the musical forms he developed did not in
any way take the stage into account.
In 1649* his favourite pupil, Marc' Antonio
* At least, Cesti's Orontea was given at the SS. Apostoli in that
year; and composers usually superintended the production of
their operas.
32
The European Conquest
Cesti (born in Arezzo, or Florence, about 1620,
died in Venice in 1669), came to Venice, bring-
ing the new Carissimi ideas, the new Carissimi
technique with him. Cesti brought the Opera
under the Carissimi influence ; and opera-com-
posers, even Cavalli himself, were only too
amenable to it. As a purely musical influence,
it was nothing but good ; as a musico-dramatic
influence, it was unspeakably bad. Not only
did Cesti bring into Opera a number of highly,
developed musical forms of absolutely unscenic
character, forms developed without a thought
of scenic requirements, and utterly unfit for
scenic uses, but he turned the popular comic
element out of doors, and brought the Opera
back to its original estate of a form of art that
appealed well-nigh exclusively to a cultivated
aristocracy. With him came the severing of
the opera buffa from the opera seria. With him,
too, began the real dramatic decline of the lat-
ter form, a decadence more intrinsic and of
serious import than the mere change from
Tragedy to Melodrama in the earlier part of
the Venetian period. More to be lamented,
because, in a form of art which is (or ought to
be) nothing if not dramatic, a move in a poor
dramatic direction is far less ruinous than a
move in a distinctly undramatic direction. In
a word, coming under the Carissimi influence
33
The Opera Past and Present
did more harm to the Opera than anything
else that ever happened to it ; it led it into a
no-thoroughfare from which no one succeeded
in extricating it until Richard Wagner took
the business in hand.
The opera buffa was far less amenable to this
influence than the opera seria ; this was natural
enough. But the opera seria was not long in
contracting every undramatic and unscenic
vice that has marred it, as a form of art, almost
to this day. Opera entered upon what may
well be called its " Oratorio epoch," becoming
nothing but Oratorio sung in costume, amid
more or less appropriate scenery.* This epoch
had best be passed over by us here in silence,
as the black, shameful period in the history
of Opera. Enough that the Oratorio style of
Italian opera seria flourished all through the
so-called "great" Neapolitan period roughly
speaking, from 1684 to 1762 f up to the Gluck
Reform, that is, through the Handel period, in
which it culminated. It was illustrated by
some of the grandest and most exquisite music
* The term Oratorio is here used in its Handelian sense : as
denoting a large form of vocal composition, not necessarily sacred,
but of more or less dramatic character, intended for concert per-
formance.
t These are the dates of the production in Naples of Alessandro
Scarlatti's Pompeo, and of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice in Vienna.
34
The European Conquest
ever written; nothing can exceed the beauty
of many things, for instance, in Handel's
operas.* But this music, though often essen-
tially dramatic in its expression, was so anta-
gonistic to all true scenic conditions that the
Opera of this epoch hardly deserves to be
ranked as Lyric Drama at all. The Lyric
Drama was virtually dethroned in this inter-
regnum of Oratorio.
One of the worst features of the business was
that it played into the hand of the virtuoso
singer as that worthy had never had it played
into before even though Peri did condone the
Archilei's " giri e gruppi" in the very beginning.
Skilled singers knew well on which side their
bread was buttered, and the opportunity to
warble forth intoxicating roulades, without the
accompanying fatigue of acting, was not to be
despised ; the whole epoch was their Golden
Age and happy hay-making time. The vocal
virtuoso soon got to be cock of the walk, and
composers themselves bowed down before him;
now and then, to be sure, a grandee like Handel
would try to throw a female of the species
* No adequate estimate of the greatness of George Frideric
Handel's genius can be formed from his oratorios; great as
these are in their way, they fall behind his Italian operas for
freshness of inspiration, originality of style, and poetic beauty of
conception.
35
The Opera Past and Present
bodily out of window, but such recalcitration
was, upon the whole, rare. Not that the move-
ment passed wholly without opposition. Mat-
ters had even come to a baddish pass before
it got under way. Benedetto Marcello (1686-
1739) gave up the whole business as a bad job
after two or three trials, turned his back upon
the stage for good and all, and betook himself to
Church Music and Consuelo's " I cieli immensi
narranno." Niccolo Jommelli (1714-1774) threw
over the da capo aria, and made his music as
dramatic as the less unscenic forms of the day
would permit. But the singers had the best of
it, and, where a man like Handel was willing to
accept the general convention, the barking of
smaller dogs went unheeded by the crowd. It
was a deplorable business, and Gluck came not
a day too soon, to put an end to it.
Meanwhile the comic form was faring better.
It had long led a rather disreputable and un-
recognized existence in many parts of Italy,
haunting very minor theatres and other resorts
of the proletariat ; from popular it became ple-
beian. But, after a while, it began to show its
face in good society again. At first in a small
way, in the shape of one-act farces, often writ-
ten by the singers themselves, given between
the acts of grander operas ; thus did it worm
its way into court theatres, and sun itself once
36
The European Conquest
more in aristocratic smiles. Then came Nic-
colo Logroscino (born in Naples about 1700,
died there in 1763) to make a reputable artistic
form of it and get it recognized as a national
institution. Pergolesi (1710-1736) and Pic-
cinni (1728-1800) carried the form still farther
upward in the artistic direction ; the opera buffa
was an established fact. Pergolesi's Serva pa-
drona (Naples, 1731) long stood as the recog-
nized ne plus ultra of the genre.
In Germany the Opera first made its appear-
ance as an imported article of court luxury.
The country was still down with the next-day's
headache after its Thirty Years' War carouse,
and princes and princekins had come to the
conclusion that their most comfortable method
of playing Saviour of Society would obviously
be for each one to set up what best duodecimo
Versailles of his own he could raise (on post-
obit), and so put Hebrew cash to a Most Christian
use. As anything wearing rouge was among
the desirable appurtenances of such miniature
Versailles, the Opera could not be unwel-
come.
Quasi-operatic entertainments, of the Italian
madrigal-play or even of the vaudeville sort,
given by imported Italians, were not unknown.
Duke Albrecht V gave one in Munich, for his
son's nuptials, as early as 1568; and his exam-
37
The Opera Past and Present
pie was imitated more than once in other parts
of Germany. The first real opera given on
German soil was also a direct imitation of the
Italian model. Heinrich Schlitz (1585-1672)
was commissioned by Elector Johann Georg II,
of Saxony, to write music to Rinuccini's li-
bretto of Dafne, the German translator, Martin
Opitz, not having succeeded in making his
translation fit Peri's ; this hybrid work was
given in Dresden in 1627 (some say, in 1628).
Though the score has been lost, there can be no
doubt that the music was in the stile rappresen-
tativo of the Camerata ; Schiitz had studied in
Venice under Giovanni Gabrieli, but evidently
found time to poke his nose into a good deal of
the new Florentine and Mantuan music on the
sly (his master not being disposed to favour that
sort of thing), for his known compositions show
the new influence. The earliest lyric drama of
entirely Teutonic workmanship came seventeen
years later, at Nuremberg in 1644; this was of
an edifying, quasi-sacred character : Das geist-
liche Waldgedicht oder Freudenspiel, genannt Seel-
ewig, by Sigismund Gottlieb Staden, organist
at the Sebalduskirche (1607-1655). But here,
too, one finds an unconcealed spirit of Italian
imitation.
With Daphne and Seelewig German musical
production for the stage seems to have gasped
38
The European Conquest
itself out for a while. With the middle of the
century, Germany was thrown open to an Ita-
lian invasion ; reigning sovereigns and rich no-
bles imported only Italian operas, with Italian
companies to sing them. Cavalli comes to Vi-
enna in 1658 to conduct \\isAlessandro il grande,
vincitor di se stesso ; Marchiati, Bernabei, Stef-
fani, and a host of others flock to transalpine
pastures, to fatten on German praise and pud-
ding.
In 1678 the " first established German opera-
house " was opened in Hamburg for the giving
of operas in the German tongue. Der erschaf-
fene,gefallene und aufgeric'htete Mensch, otherwise
known as Adam und Eva, was given on the
opening night ; a farrago of pseudo-philosophic
Sunday-school religiosity, tempered with ballet-
dancing, quite as astonishing as its title ; the
text by one Richter (who seems to have been a
sort of Holy Roman Empire laureate in his
way), the music by Johann Theile (1646-1724;
pupil of Schutz, and teacher of Zachau, Hasse,
and Buxtehude). Works like this, and also se-
cular ones, written by Nikolaus Adam Strungk
(1640-1700), Johann Wolfgang Franck (1641-
1688), and Johann Philipp Fortsch (1652-1708),
formed the staple of the repertory for some
years. The libretti were, for the most part,
villainous adaptations of Italian or French
39
The Opera Past and Present
texts ; the music, written in the clumsiest Ita-
lianizing vein.
But a change was not far off. In 1697 Rein-
hardt Reiser (1673-1739) came from the court
of Braunschweig- Wolfenbiittel to settle in
Hamburg; from that year, when his Irene was
brought out, to 1734, the year of his Circe, his
name was identified with the fortunes of the
opera-house. Reiser stands in history as the
great characteristic protagonist of German
Opera in the first half of the eighteenth cen-
tury. He gave up the Italianizing style of his
predecessors, and wrote music that was essen-
tially German in style and feeling. Unfortu-
nately, his formula was none other than the
Italian " Oratorio-Opera " formula of Scarlatti,
Handel, and others of the Neapolitan school.
So in Germany, too, do we find the trail of the
Oratorio serpent over Opera, quite as much as
in Italy.* Let Reiser's operas (well over a
hundred of them, though the exact number is
not known) remain in oblivion with Scarlatti's
and Handel's.
In one respect, the Opera met with much the
same fortunes in Hamburg that it did in Venice,
a century earlier. The Hamburg movement,
* Let not this be deemed disrespectful to the (sometimes) sacred
character of Oratorio. The serpent is mentioned in Holy Writ,
and is, to that extent, a " sacred" animal.
40
The European Conquest
like the Venetian before it, was intrinsically a
popular one : it meant Opera in the vernacular
for the people ; and the comic element was
taken largely into account, even in some of the
earlier biblical works. Many of Fortsch's
operas were actual Singspiele (with spoken dia-
logue, like the French ope'ra-comique). But, with
Reiser's advent, as with Cesti's in Venice,
the aristocratic opera seria, of Oratorio cut,
began more and more to oust the popular form,
and soon reigned alone. Neither did this form
flourish in the vernacular long after Reiser's
death ; the Italian invasion swept over all Ger-
many, and even native composers wrote to
Italian texts. Up to Mozart, the only national
form was the Singspiel* which had been so well
killed by Keiser that it had to be virtually born
again, by imitating not very good French optras-
comiques and still poorer English musical farces.
It did not attain to anything like maturity till
the time of Josef Haydn (1732-1809).
Upon the whole, the chief obstacle in the way
of the establishment and maintenance of a na-
tional form of Opera in Germany was a general
lack of innate dramatic sense in the people ; their
musical sense was fully as keen as that of the
Italians, but their dramatic sense was weak and
* Such of Gluck's serious operas as were given in German in
Vienna, and elsewhere, were first written for Paris in French.
41
The Opera Past and Present
easily satisfied. In France it was just the other
way: there the obstacle was the combination
of a very highly developed and fastidious dra-
matic sense with a merely rudimentary, but
equally fastidious, musical sense. Where the
Germans were ready to welcome Italian Opera
with open arms, no matter how absurd the text
and the relation of the music thereto, the French
not only turned up their critical noses at the
libretti offered them, but rejected much of the
Italian music as beyond their comprehension.*
They were disposed to be great sticklers for
dramatic and scenic truth in the music of the
Lyric Drama; but, as none but the very sim-
plest musical forms appealed to them, they
could see scenic appositeness in these only.
Save for what have been called premonitory
symptoms, of much the same sort as those al-
ready noted in Italy, the introduction of Opera
into France, as into Germany, was owing to
Italian influence. In 1645 a company of Italian
players gave the Festa teatrale della Finta pazza
before the queen at the palais du Petit-Bour-
bon : a five-act comedy with songs and decla-
* Not that they admitted this ; like other half-musical people,
they were rich in plausible- sounding criticism on the " un-
natural" exuberance of passion and the too extensive develop-
ments of Italian music. But the truth was that they had neither
technical understanding of, nor temperamental sympathy with, it.
42
The European Conquest
mation, not to mention dances of bears and
monkeys, drinking ostriches, and other mena-
gerie items. In 1646 cardinal Alessandro Bichi,
bishop of Carpentras and apostolic nuncio of
Urban VIII, gave a musical tragedy in the
hall of his episcopal palace : Achebar, roi du
Mogol, text and music by his secretary, the
abb6 Mailly. In 1647 cardinal Mazarin gave,
at the Palais-Royal in Paris, a scenically sump-
tuous performance of an Orfeo by Luigi Rossi.
Other Italian and one or two French ventures
followed; among the latter, the Pastorale en
musique, or Optra cTIssy, of Lully and Cambert,
in 1659, given (on Italian instigation) in private,
and considered at the time to be quite in the
Florentine Camerata vein. It was, however,
only a quasi-dramatic cantata, not an opera ;
but so successful that it had to be repeated in
public. People began to talk of a " national "
French form of Opera, fit to hold its own, and
more, against anything of Italian importation.
So wide awake had French chauvinism become
that Cavalli (invited to Paris by Mazarin) made
two downright fiascos with his Serse in 1660,
and his Ercole amante in 1662.
Shortly after the accession of Louis XIV to
the throne, Pierre Perrin (1620-1675) obtained
letters patent from the king (dated June 28,
1669) to establish an Academy of Music " like
43
The Opera Past and Present
those in Italy " for twelve years. He associated
with himself Robert Cambert (1628-1677), for
the music, the marquis de Sourd6ac, for the
scenery and machines, and Bersac de Cham-
peron, for the financial part ; a company was
formed, and, on March 19, 1671, the Acade*mie
Royale de Musique was opened with Pomone,
a pastoral in a prologue and five acts, the text
by Perrin, the music by Cambert. Few insti-
tutions destined to exert a potent influence
over the world of Art have had so poor a be-
ginning ; Pomone was about equally wretched
dramatically and musically. But it broke the
ice: the world-famous Academic de Musique
was a realized fact. It first occupied the jeu
de paume (tennis-court) de la Bouteille in the
rue des Fosses-de-Nesle (now rue Mazarine)
in the faubourg Saint-Germain.*
* It will be not uninteresting to give here at least five of the
thirteen houses successively occupied by this institution, and the
principal composers associated with each. The premier Theatre
du Palais-Royal in the rue Saint-Honore, between the rue de
Valois and the rue des Bons-Enfans (1673-1763, Lully-Rameau
period) ; the deuxitme Theatre du Palais-Royal, on the site of
the foregoing (1770-1781, Gluck-Piccinni period); the Theatre de
la R/publique et des Arts in the rue de la Loi, now rue de Riche-
lieu (1794-1820, Spontini period); the Salle provisoire in the rue
Lepelletier (1821-1873, Auber- Rossini- Meyerbeer period, cover-
ing also the earlier years of Gounod) ; the present house in the
place de 1'Opera (1875). All but the last were burnt.
44
The European Conquest
If Perrin and Cambert were its founders,
they can hardly be called the true founders of
French Opera. This glory belongs to the
Italian, Lully.
Giovanni Battista Lulli (Jean-Baptiste Lully
after his naturalization in 1661) was born in
Florence in 1633, and was taken by the cheva-
lier de Guise to Paris, where he entered the
service of mademoiselle de Montpensier as
scullion. One day the comte de Nogent was
attracted by his violin-playing, and he was pro-
moted to a place among mademoiselle's musi-
cians. Other promotions followed in time,
with intermediate study of music under
Metru, Roberdet, and Gigault, organists at
Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs : positions at court,
inspectorship of the "grande bande" conduc-
torship of the " petits violons" posts of surin-
tendant de la musique de chambre, maitre de mu-
sique to the royal family, commissions to write
ballets and divertissements for court festivities,
even for Cavalli's operas. By intriguing with
madame de Montespan he succeeded in jockey-
ing Perrin and his associates out of their Aca-
demic de Musique concession in 1672 and having
the direction transferred to himself. For the
next fourteen years he displayed incomparable
genius, talent, and business ability as composer,
director, ballet-master, machinist, conductor,
45
The Opera Past and Present
and even teacher of singers and dancers. A
man of complete unscrupulousness and rascal-
ity, he managed to make himself indispensable,
and held his post in spite of all opposition, not
to mention a sense of impudent humour quite
out of keeping with a courtier's prudence.*
After writing upwards of thirty ballets and
divertissements (from 1658 to 1671, Moliere's
Psych^ was the last) and twenty operas (1672-
1686), beside no little instrumental and church
music, this indefatigable " coquin tMbreux" (as
Boileau called him) died in Paris on March 22,
1687 of an abscess in the foot, brought on by
accidentally hitting his toe with his baton while
conducting.
In establishing the form known as French
Grand Opera, Lully had the advantage of the
collaboration of the dramatic poet Philippe Qui-
nault, the author of most of his libretti. His
task was none of the easiest : to adapt what was
essentially Italian Opera to the French taste ;
with Quinault's aid, he performed it, not only
* Once, when some trouble with the scenery delayed the raising
of the curtain, word was brought him that the king was tired of
waiting, and wished the performance to begin; "The king is
master here," replied Lully like a shot, " le roi est bien le maitre,
and is free to be as tired of waiting as he pleases ! " One can
fancy the Grand Monarque's face when this was benevolently re-
ported to him as it undoubtedly was, for Lully did not lack " kind
friends."
LULLY.
The European Conquest
with genius, but with surpassing cleverness and
insight into the French character. He had the
wit to let his Italian musical instinct be guided
by those principles of the Drama on which the
French have ever prided themselves, as the
first dramaturgic nation of the world. Musi-
cally his operas show the influence of Cavalli
and other contemporary Venetians, which in-
fluence was already tinged by that of Caris-
simi and Cesti. But, in accepting the musical
forms of Italian Opera, not blindly, as Reiser
did in Hamburg, he wisely modified them in
a way to make them appeal to the keen Gallic
sense for dramatic fitness. He retained all
that a half-musical, but dramatically fastidi-
ous, audience could understand, among other
things, the chorus, which the Venetians had
banished, but eliminated everything that
would have been thrown away upon his par-
ticular public. His style is marked by great
musical simplicity and a poignant truthfulness
of dramatic expression ; his music seldom lacks
a distinctly scenic quality, it is eminently fitted
for the stage.*
* Regarding this matter, it should be remembered that the scenic
requirements of the classic French trag/dieto which class of
Drama Lully's libretti for the most part belonged were not very
great. There was more haranguing than dramatic action, in the
Shaksperian sense,
47
The Opera Past and Present
The form of serious Opera established by
Lully long remained the standard norm in
France. What subsequent modifications it
underwent at the hands of Gluck and others
were more of the nature of natural progres-
sive developments than of radical changes.
Lully's works held the stage unrivalled, for he
had no worthy immediate French successors,
until the advent of Jean-Philippe Rameau (born
at Dijon in 1683, died in Paris in 1764).
Rameau was a far abler technical musician
than Lully ; his fame as a musical theorist, as
the first founder of a System of Harmony, need
only be alluded to here. Indeed, so great was
he as organist, clavecinist, and writer for those
instruments, that nothing save the predesti-
nation of his Gallic blood can explain his ever
taking up Opera at all. As it was, he only be-
gan to write for the stage in his fiftieth year.
As a dramatic composer, Rameau compares
with Lully very much as Cavalli does with
Monteverdi. Both Monteverdi and Lully threw
their whole weight upon dramatic truth of ex-
pression, as a matter of well-grounded artistic
principle ; they were consequently exceedingly
fastidious about the character and quality of
their libretti. Cavalli and Rameau cared not
a whit what they set to music, and were dra-
matic more by unconquerable instinct than by
48
The European Conquest
calculation. The influence they exerted upon
the evolution of the Opera tended more in a
musical than in a dramatic direction. And yet,
such is the mysterious nature of the Art of
Tones, one can not say that the results they
achieved were less intrinsically dramatic than
those obtained by Monteverdi and Lully, in
spite of a certain evident inconsistency in the
means employed. Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie
(1733), Dardanus (1739), and a few other operas
held the stage well into the Gluck period. He
closed what may be called the first epoch of
French Grand Opera, a fqrm of Opera which,
notwithstanding a certain rigid conventionality
of style, never descended to the unscenic ab-
surdities of the Italian " Oratorio " type. Side
by side with it, however, the imported Italian
article sung by Italians in Italian flourished
more and more in France. The old chauvinism
which had crushed Cavalli in 1660 gradually
lost its grip, and, considerably before the ri-
valry between the two great champions, Gluck
and Piccinni, the French opera-going public
was split up into two opposing parties : the
Italophiles and the Nationalists. The Italian
conquest swept over France, too, but not, as in
Germany, to even a temporary extinction of
native Opera.
It has often been stated that the Opera was
49
The Opera Past and Present
developed in England from the Masque; but
this is only partly true. As a gorgeous piece
of poetic stage pageantry with incidental music,
the Masque evidently needed but a magical
touch like Baltazarini's in the Ballet de la
Reine, giving more dramatic consistency to the
scheme to turn it into something quite as like
Opera as the French court ballet of 1581. The
nearer the Masque approached the real Drama,
the nearer would it, almost propter hoc, ap-
proach the Opera. In 1617 Nicolo Laniere
(born in London, of Italian parents, about 1590,
died between 1665 and 1670) set the whole text
of the masque by Ben Jonson that was given
at Lord Hay's house to music in the "stile
recitative " (clearly enough, the stile rappresen-
tativo of the Camerata). This is the earliest
known instance of the whole of a dramatic, or
quasi-dramatic, text being set to music in Eng-
land ; the model upon which it was evidently
based, the original Florentine favola in musica,
was then twenty years old. But this first at-
tempt, like the French Ballet de la Reine, was a
mere flash in the pan ; it found no imitators,
and the music of the Masque fell back into its
original incidental estate.
A more germane source of the Opera in Eng-
land is to be found in the long-familiar inci-
dental music in the spoken Drama. This was
50
The European Conquest
developed by one man into something more
closely resembling Opera than anything else
known in the country before the Italian inva-
sion of the first quarter of the eighteenth cen-
tury on one occasion, into Opera itself. This
man was Henry Purcell (born in London about
1658, died there on November 21, 1695), the last
genius of the first rank England ever gave to
the Art of Music. Purcell studied composition
under Pelham Humphries, who was a pupil
of Lully's, and no doubt studied some of the
French master's scores, possibly also one or two
of Cavalli's, with considerable assiduity. He
wrote music to masques and plays, some of
which latter were even called operas on the title-
page. But only one really was an opera.* Be-
side what is commonly known as incidental
music, overtures, interludes, and such instru-
mental and vocal music as is indicated in the au-
thor's stage-directions, Purcell would at times
set the text of a scene, or part of a scene, quite
in the operatic way. Such scenes thus became
actual operatic fragments ; Purcell's setting of
* The line of demarcation between a play with incidental music
and an opera, like that between optra-comique and vaudeville,
must be drawn somewhere. The small proportion of the music
to the text, also the fact that the play begins as a spoken drama,
the music only coming in later, should be enough to put all but
one of Purcell's dramatic works out of the operatic category. *
The Opera Past and Present
them, not to mention the genius displayed, was
so far in advance of anything- of the sort known
in any part of Europe in his day, in point of
dramatic and musical freedom and scenic qua-
lity, that one can only regret his early death's
preventing his taking to opera-writing on a
larger scale. Leaving intrinsic genius out of
the question, which would be largely on Pur-
cell's side, some of his musical scenes come
quite up to anything by Gluck ; the musical
treatment is at once as free, as unhampered by
convention, as essentially dramatic and scenic.
Purcell wrote music to some forty and odd
plays, the first being Nahum Tate's Dido and
jEneas (1675),* and the last, Bonduca, altered
from Beaumont and Fletcher (given posthu-
mously in 1696).
He had no worthy successor ; indeed, the
decline of English Music may be said to have
begun with his death. When George Frideric
Handel (1685-1759) came to London, and his
Rinaldo was brought out there in 1711, England
was in just the condition to become the easiest
sort of prey to the Italian invasion. In 1720
came Giovanni Battista Bononcini (1660-1750),
in 1721, Attilio Ariosti (1660-?), and Italian
* This was his only real opera. The brevity of the text, if no-
thing else, shows that the whole libretto was written especially for
musical setting.
52
The European Conquest
Opera of the most pronounced " Oratorio " type
had the whole field to itself. In Handel we
descry the culmination of the fatal Carissimi
influence upon the Opera ; with him the " Ora-
torio" type attained to its fullest bloom in
perfection of plastic and imaginative musical
beauty, in utter dearth of scenic quality.
But, though Italian Opera reigned for a while
alone in England, it did not reign unopposed ;
the English could not but feel the inherent ab-
surdity of the form. In 1728 John Rich brought
out at his theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields The
Beggar's Opera, the text by John Gay, the music
arranged from popular ballads by Dr. Pepusch
(born in Berlin in 1667, died in London in 1752).
This was the beginning of the English Ballad
Opera, the only form the English have since cul-
tivated with success.* Charles Dibdin's (1745-
1814) operas, even the Gilbert and Sullivan ope-
rettas of our own day, all come from this stock.
Thus did the Opera make the conquest of
Europe; the Italian form carrying out a suc-
cessful invasion, and native forms springing
up in imitation of it, in France, Germany, and
England.
* Unless we except the operas of Michael William Balfe (1808-
1870) and Vincent Wallace (1814-1865), which stagger about
rather uncertainly between the Italian opera seria and the native
Ballad model.
53
HI
Gluck
IN the year 1741, when Handel's last opera,
Deidamia,vr2iS given in London, Gluck's first,
Artaserse, was brought out in Milan ; a coinci-
dence to be deemed significant by the super-
stitious. The grand autocrat of the old regime
makes his parting bow just as the herald of the
new comes upon the scene; le Roy est mort !
vive le Roy !
Christoph Willibald Gluck afterward fond
of insisting upon his title of Ritter von Gluck
(he was made cavaliere of the Order of the Sprone
d'Oro in Rome in 1754) was born at the village
of Weidenwang, near Neumarkt in the Upper
Palatinate, on July 2, 1714. His parents were
in the service of Prinz Lobkowitz, and he passed
his childhood at the prince's castle of Eisenberg.
His education was tolerably well cared for, ac-
cording to the notions of the day ; at twelve he
was sent to a Jesuit school at Kommotau in
Bohemia; at eighteen, to Prag, where he studied
music under Bohuslav Cernohorsky, and took
54
Gluck
to practising on the 'cello. In 1736, being then
twenty-two, he entered the private band of
prince Melzi in Vienna, soon following his pa-
tron to Milan, where he finished his professional
studies under Sammartini.* After four years'
work at counterpoint and other forms of com-
position, he felt himself ready to face the world
as a composer " en gros" as Mendelssohn would
have said, f
He had rare good luck : some things he had
written for prince Melzi's chamber-music got
him the commission to write a grand opera for
the court theatre. For his libretto he took
Metastasio's Artaserse. Even in this, his first
opera, he determined to cut loose from many of
the traditions of the " Oratorio " school, and
write music that should be at once more dra-
matic and more scenic. But he told no one of
his intention, and finished his score all but one
aria to suit himself. With this one aria lack-
ing, the opera was put into rehearsal, and every
musical dabster present pooh-poohed the " new
style " most contemptuously. This Gluck had
counted on ; before the final rehearsal he wrote
* Giovanni Battista Sammartini, who ran a good third to the tie
between Boccherini and Josef Haydn in the legendary race for the
"invention " of the string quartet.
t"I am a wholesale pianist (engros Pianist); I can't play
small things in public! " FELIX MENDELSSOHN, reported orally.
55
The Opera Past and Present
the missing aria wholly in the conventional
style, and a still larger gathering of cognoscenti
than had been at the first rehearsal praised it
highly, even suspecting it of coming from the
pen of Sammartini himself. The audience on
the opening night straightway quashed this
verdict, though, crying out that that particular
aria was simply insipid and quite unworthy of
the rest of the score. Thus did our young
Oberpfalzer slyboots score one off his first
judges !
So Gluck had from the first this ambition to
make the Opera more dramatic than his prede-
cessors and contemporaries had done. But he
had as yet no definite formula ; his innovations
were still evolutionary, rather than revolution-
ary ; he did nothing that could be called radi-
cal. Yet what he did was new enough to
scare the critics, who, as academic policemen,
guarded nothing more carefully than the invio-
lable sacredness of traditional forms. But, if
severely handled at times by the critics, Gluck
would now and then get compensating sym-
pathy from others. When a certain passage in
the aria " Se mat senti spirarti sul volto" in his
Clemenza di Tito (Naples, 1751), was scathingly
criticised, it was shown to old Durante,* who
* Francesco Durante (1684-1755), then, at the age of sixty-
seven, the recognized supreme master of Neapolitan church music.
56
Gluck
said : "I do not feel like deciding whether
this passage is entirely in accordance with the
rules of composition ; but this I can tell you,
that all of us, myself to begin with, would be
very proud of having thought of and written
such a passage ! "
From 1741 on, Gluck continued writing Ita-
lian operas ; with enormous success in Italy and
Vienna, in spite of the critics, if with no success
whatever in England. He travelled a good
deal, and the hearing of some Rameau operas in
Paris must have given him wholesome food for
meditation. From about 1755 to 1761 he showed
signs of lapsing into mere 1 conventionalism, and
seemed to treat opera-writing as sheer practice-
work, to gain technical facility. His mind was
really filled with other matters ; he had been
for some time applying himself with zeal to fill-
ing out the gaps in his defective general educa-
tion, studying aesthetics, languages, and lite-
rature, and getting what good he could from
frequenting the society of cultivated people.
He had plainly become dissatisfied with the
scope and efficacy of his dramatic innovations
in Opera, and was meditating a more thorough
and logically formulated reform.
At last (about 1760) he met the right man to
help him : the Italian poet Raniero de' Calza-
bigi, of Leghorn, editor of Metastasio's works
57
The Opera Past and Present
in Paris, Counsellor at the Netherland Cham-
ber of Accounts in Vienna, noted writer on
aesthetics, etc., etc. With him he talked the
problem over: the defects of the Italian opera
seria, and how these defects were best to be
cured. The two pitched upon the following
items as lying at the root of the reigning evil :
the irresponsible vanity of the virtuoso singer,
and the flaccid conventionality of the Metasta-
sio libretto full of poetic beauty (of a sort), but
almost totally lacking dramatic quality, espe-
cially such as could be intensified by music.
The practical upshot was that Calzabigi wrote
the text of Orfeo ed Euridice, and Gluck set
it to music. One can not help smiling at the
work's having first to be submitted to Meta-
stasio, to avoid the foregone conclusion of a fia-
sco ; the court poet's influence was not to be
trifled with ! Still more must one smile at Me-
tastasio's carrying his friendship for Gluck and
Calzabigi to the point of " agreeing to offer no
active opposition to the new work," sure in his
good heart that the public would take the
trouble of damning it off his hands ; he little
dreamt that he was digging his own grave !
Orfeo, brought out at the Vienna Burgtheater
on October 5, 1762, was the first cannon-shot of
the new Revolution. It was no " Veni, vidi,
vici" being considerably discussed at first ; but
58
Gluck
the public came to it gradually, and Gluc"k's
campaign opened with a very palpable victory.
Much the same was true of Alceste the libretto
by Calzabigi, after Euripides given on Decem-
ber 26, 1766. This work fairly separated the
sheep from the goats in the Viennese public ; the
more seriously inclined saw that it was on a
still higher plane of tragic grandeur than Orfeo,
but a large mass of opera-goers found it rather
too much of a good thing. " If that is the sort
of evening's entertainment the Court Opera is
to provide, good bye ; we can go to church
without paying two Gulden ! " Gluck had to
find out that fighting long-established conven-
tion is no bed of roses, and that impeccably at-
tired patrons of aristocratic Opera are much in-
clined to resent seriousness that has not been
cured of its deformity by sweetly-warbling di-
vinities of the virtuoso species. But unques-
tionable success came with time, and Alceste
established Gluck's position even more firmiy
than Orfeo had done.
Passing over Paride ed Elena a strong work,
but ill received by the public and some other
minor matters, we come to Gluck's meeting
with the second poet who was to have a deter-
mining influence upon his destiny : the bailli du
Rollet, attach6 to the French legation in Vi-
enna. Du Rollet encouraged Gluck's already-
59
The Opera Past and Present
formed wish to go to Paris, as the properest
field for him. He had become dissatisfied with
the executive means he found in Vienna, and
longed for the Acad6mie de Musique, where
there were " well skilled and intelligent actors,
who combined a noble and soulful play of ges-
ture with the art of song." Du Rollet took Ra-
cine's Iphig/nie en Aulide and turned it into a
libretto, Gluck setting to work forthwith upon
the score; even before it was completed, it was
pronounced to be just the thing for Paris.
To wish to go to Paris was one thing ; to get
officially invited thither, another. It seemed to
French chauvinism that Paris had already quite
foreigners enough to put up with in resident
Italian musicians, and that the prospect of hav-
ing to do with an admittedly strong German,
and an aesthetic revolutionary to boot, was
rather appalling. There was plotting and
counterplotting galore, letter-writing without
end. At last Marie Antoinette's influence car-
ried the day, she had been Gluck's pupil in
Vienna, before her marriage, and she suc-
ceeded in doing more for her former teacher
than crowned heads or rich patrons (who have
troubles of their own) often do for those who
need their help. But Marie Antoinette's get-
ting Gluck his invitation was enough to set
madame Dubarry tooth and nail against him
60
CLUCK.
.. ,J
Gluck
just to show the world that a king's particular
Fair Perdition was not to be outdone in court
influence by any woman alive, let alone a Dau-
phine ! The Dubarry was really at the bottom
of most of the anti-Gluck agitation in Paris.
When Gluck came to Paris in 1773, with his
Iphigtnie all ready for the boards, his expecta-
tions of the personnel of the Acad6mie de Mu-
sique were not wholly fulfilled. He found the
acting as good as he had expected, but princi-
pals, chorus, and orchestra had fallen into the
most deplorable musical habits ; it took all his
personal force, indomitable Teutonic pertina-
city, and skill as a conductor, to whip them up to
the mark. He succeeded, though, and Iphige 1 -
nie en Aulide was brought to a satisfactory per-
formance on April 19, 1774. It made a colder
impression at first than any of his operas had
in Vienna, but, like them, gradually made its
way with the public. Then the storm broke
loose !
The chief contestants in this famous Gluck
controversy were, on Gluck's side, the abb6
Arnaud and the " Anonyme de Vaugirard" (really
Suard by name); on the opposing side, Mar-
montel, La Harpe, Guingueni, d'Alembert, the
chevalier de Chastilleux, Fram6ry, and Co-
queau. Grimm held a dignifiedly neutral posi-
tion, or tried to make believe he did ; two of
61
The Opera Past and Present
the most important of Gluck's favourers were
Jean-Jacques and Voltaire, but neither of the
two took any active part in the fight. La
Harpe whose sharp wit fairly took the bit in
its teeth, and got beyond his own or any one's
control was the enfant terrible of the whole
business, and did his own side as much harm as
good ; the Anonyme de Vaugirard took an espe-
cial delight in getting a rise out of him and
prodding him to desperation.
Upon the whole, with all the wit, acute
thought, and literary ability brought to bear
upon the matter, first and last, this once-great
controversy is no very edifying reading now ;
what controversialists on new aesthetic pro-
blems most lack is originality, the new problems
suggest to them no new arguments, neither
does the world's past experience in similar
cases stead them a jot. It is always the same
old story, over and over again, this organized
kicking against the Rising Sun. Read the dis-
cussion between Monteverdi and Artusi in the
first decade of the seventeenth century, the
pen-and-ink tiffs between Wagnerians and anti-
Wagnerians in the third quarter of the nine-
teenth, and you will have read practically all
that was urged for and against Gluck in Paris
in the 'seventies of the eighteenth. It was, in
the last analysis, merely a Wotan and Fricka
62
Gluck
business,* a volcanic conspuation of the New,
" des Niedagewesenen" on the one hand, a firmly
convinced championing of it, on the other. The
anti-Gluck side of the controversy is well sum-
marized by Schmidif "These criticisms had
two different purposes : first, they tried to prove
that the Ritter von Gluck lacked all power of
song, and next, that he set things to music that
were not appropriate to song." And, if the in-
telligent reader knows of any " new light " in
the whole history of Lyric Drama of whom
this has not been said, he will confer a favour
upon the present author by mentioning his
name !
The impression produced by Iphigtnie en
Aulide as the performances wore on was still
strengthened by Orphte et Euridice, given in
August, 1774, in a translation by Moline, with
the part of Orphee, originally written for con-
* FRICKA
Wann ward es erlebt,
dass, etc.?
WOTAN
Heut' hast du's erlebt !
WAGNER, Die Walkure, Act II., Scene I.
(Fricka Who ever lived to see that, etc.? Wotan To-day hast
thou lived to see it !)
t ANTON SCHMID, Christoph Willibald, Ritter von Gluck, page
277. Leipzig: Friedrich Fleischer, 1854.
63
The Opera Past and Present
tralto, transposed for Legros's high tenor. Of
rArbre enchante 1 (Versailles, February 20, 1775)
and the three-act ballet Cythere assize (Acade-
mic de Musique, August i, 1775), nothing need
be said here. Gluck had returned to Vienna
for a while, taking with him a remodelled ver-
sion of the text of his Alceste by du Rollet and
Quinault's libretto of Armide et Renaud, mean-
ing to retouch the former score, and reset the
latter text, for Paris. He was at work on both
scores in Vienna when he got news of the
latest trick of his opponents in Paris : the Ita-
lian, Piccinni, had been invited, and was to set
Quinault's Roland tor the Academic de Musique.
Gluck's pride was bitten to the quick ; a flaming
letter of his to du Rollet found its way (without
his leave) into the Annte litte'raire, and only
served still further to exasperate the opposi-
tion. The Italophiles now had a champion of
their own, and the Gluck controversy became
the Gluck-Piccinni war, compared to which the
old Handel-Bononoini business in London was
a mere squabble.
In 1776 Gluck came back to Paris, and Al-
ceste was given at the Acad6mie de Musique on
April 23. It was a bad night for the Gluckists ;
the opera was roundly hissed, the disappointed
composer whimpering out " Alceste est tombe'e / "
upon a friend's shoulder. " Oui, tombe'e du del! "
64
Gluck
replied the latter, fain to seek consolation in an
epigram. But the fiasco was only for a while ;
Alcestes gradual success in Vienna was repeated
in Paris, and Gluck once more ended by car-
rying the day.
On September 23, 1777, Armide was brought
out ; the immediate result was about the same
as usual, only that indifference took the place
of hissing. For one thing, the anti-Gluckists
could not howl at Gluck's " impudence " in
daring to reset a text already set by the great
Lully, as it had been feared they would ; for
their own Piccinni had put them in a glass
house by setting Quinault's Roland, of which
Lully was also the original composer.* More-
over, Gluck had paid French taste no mean
compliment in taking Quinault's Armide et Re-
naud exactly as it stood, without subjecting it
to those modifications which he had had made
in all his previous classical libretti. But the
indifference with which Armide was greeted
at first soon wore off, and by the time Piccin-
ni was ready with his Roland Gluck's position
was again very strong indeed. Piccinni, to
say the truth, was rather a laggardly champion,
taking an infinite time in coming up to the
scratch ; which is partly to be accounted for
* Piccinni did not, like Gluck, set Quinault's text as it stood,
but in an adaptation by Marmontel.
65
The Opera Past and Present
by the poor man's not knowing a word of
French when he first set to work upon his
score. But on January 27, 1778, Roland was
at last brought out, after endless trouble and
squabbling at rehearsals ; as a first cannon-shot
into the Gluckist camp, it did a certain amount
of execution, at least, the controversy became
doubly acrid after it. It remained at white
heat until the final " duel " settled matters.
It was agreed that both Gluck and Piccinni
should write an opera, Iphige'nie en Tauride ;
they could thus fight it out between them on
the same ground. Gluck took a libretto by
Guillard ; Piccinni, one by Dubreuil. This
" duel," as usual, was rather a long one, Gluck's
opera being given on May 18, 1779, Piccinni's
not till January 23, 1781 some time after
Gluck had left Paris for good. The result,
however, was decisive ; Gluck's Iphige'nie capped
the climax of his Paris successes, was indeed
the first of his Paris operas that won unques-
tionable public favour on the opening night,
whereas Piccinni's had a mere succes d'estime
even with its own party, the more eager of
whom tried to explain its quasi-failure with
the general public by the undeniable fact that,
on the second night, the beauteous Laguerre
(who sang Iphigenie) was hopelessly the worse
for strong liquor " Ipkigtnie en Champagne!"
66
Gluck
said pert Sophie Arnould, who had sung
Gluck's first Iphig6nie.
It is quite plain that the success of Gluck's
Iphige'nie en Tauride was thoroughly genuine,
based on the quality of the work itself. No
less strong an opera could have so utterly rout-
ed Piccinni's as it did ; especially as Gluck,
after his Iphige'nie, had had a palpable failure
with his Echo et Narcisse on September 24,
1779, thus leaving Paris with his latest opera
on record as a fiasco. Piccinni was, in truth,
no weakling at all ; he was even something of
a dramatic reformer in Opera himself, quite as
much as Gluck in his earlier Italian and Vien-
nese days. But Gluck had far outstripped him
since then, and had, moreover, as much greater
force of innate genius than he as Handel had
than Bononcini. Piccinni was swept from the
stage into oblivion, not because he was weak,
but because Gluck was stronger ; also because
the Gluck idea was stouter and truer than his.
Had he not been inadvisedly brought to Paris
to take part in that unequal contest with the
doughty Austrian, he might have gone comfort-
ably down in history as a worthy forerunner of
the Gluck Reform ; but, being thus brought
face to face with and in opposition to it, he
was crushed.
Echo et Narcisse was Gluck's last work for
57
The Opera Past and Present
the stage ; with it he leaves the history of
Opera.* He died of apoplexy in Vienna on
November 15, 1787.
As a reformer, Gluck was but little of a
radical, hardly anything of a theorist. The
best confession of artistic faith we have from
his pen, his preface to Alcesteft stands in his-
tory, with Peri's to Euridice and Victor Hugo's
to Cromwell, as one of the most famous of its
kind. But there is very little constructive
theorizing in it; it is, for the most part, ne-
gative in character, pointing out what is most
to be avoided in opera-writing. It is a docu-
ment of sheer sound artistic common sense, not
a philosophico-scientific marshalling of princi-
ples to a firmly based theory ; admirable as far
as it goes, but not going far. Had Gluck's
Reform rested with this document alone, there
would have been little life in it.
The real essence and mainspring of this
* Les Danaides (text by du Rollet and Tschudi), which was
brought out at the Academic de Musique on April 26, 1784, was
advertised as "by Gluck and Salieri " ; but, after the thirteenth
performance, Gluck announced that the score was entirely by Sa-
lieri. The libretto was sent to Gluck in 1783, with the request to
write the score ; but he did not feel in condition to undertake the
work then, and handed over the text to his pupil "the foreigner
who alone had learnt his manner of him, since no German cared
to."
t Vide Appendix, page 227.
68
Gluck
much-talked-of Reform was Gluck's own in-
trinsic dramatic genius; his true strength as a
reformer lay in his work, not in his doctrine.
In him the old dramatic spirit of Peri, Monte-
verdi, and Cavalli breathed fresh and strong
again ; and it was the vigourous expression he
gave to this spirit in his music that won him
adherents, while his ruthless sacrifice of the
time-honoured conventional operatic frippery
to this expression made him enemies among
those to whom old habits were dear.
What was new in Gluck was his musico-
dramatic individuality, his style ; for there was
little really new in his principles. Not only did
these date back, as far as they went, to the
earliest days of Opera, but the artistic sins
and abuses he stigmatized the slavish subser-
viency of composers to the whims of the virtu-
oso singer, the sacrifice of dramatic interest
to irrelevant musical developments had been
pointed out and deplored by more than one
musician before him.
Gluck's Reform did not lack precursory he-
ralds ; the evils he set himself to cure had long
been recognized as such, and he was not the
first to attempt to cure them. But he was the
first to strike the decisive blow, to go, if not
quite to the root of the matter, at least as near
to the root as was necessary for his purpose.
69
The Opera Past and Present
And, as for his lack of radicalism, note how, in
his preface, all even of the negative theses have
their conditioning if or when. He does not
oppose vocal ornamentation, for instance, abso-
lutely and along the whole line, but only when it
becomes damaging to dramatic common sense.
He showed the same lack of uncompromising
radicalism in his practice : there is many a vocal
show-piece in his operas, but brought in in the
right place, not into the midst of an ardent
dramatic action.
Gluck is fairly to be regarded as the Father
of Modern Opera ; a sufficient commentary on
this is the very fact that his are the earliest
operas that hold the stage to this day. He
followed Philipp Emanuel Bach and Haydn in
employing a standard composition of the or-
chestra,* and banished the time-honoured cem-
balo (harpsichord) from it ; he was thus the first
opera-composer to write out his scores com-
pletely, leaving nothing to be added by the
cembalist. He was equally great in impas-
sioned or pathetic melody and in every form of
recitative ; his dramatic use of the chorus can
hardly be surpassed in mastery. The opening
scenes of the first and second acts of his Orfeo
* Up to, and including, Handel, there had been no standard
composition of the orchestra, the aggregations of instruments
used by composers being exceedingly various.
70
Gluck
Euridice's funeral rites, and Orfeo's entrance
into Hades are still unsurpassed masterpieces
in this last particular.
Like most "new" men, Gluck was terribly
fastidious about the style in which his works
were to be given. Concerning Orfeo's aria,
" Che farb senza Euridice?" he writes to the
duke of Braganza:* "Were one to make the
slightest change in it, in the tempo or the mode
of expression, it would become an air for the
marionette stage. In a piece of this order, a
more or less sustained note, a forcing of the
tone, a neglect of the proper tempo, a trill,
roulade, etc., can entirely destroy the effect of
a scene." He was an inexorable rehearser, in-
finitely hard to satisfy.
In a specific sense, Gluck's great achievement
was to fix the form of French Grand Opera for
nearly a century, taking the form as already
established by Lully and Rameau for a basis.
What may be called the Gluck formula sub-
sisted with but slight modification in France
until Meyerbeer came above the horizon.
From Orfeo ed Euridice to Iphige'nie en Tauride,
his operas are distinctly grand operas ; to pro-
duce their proper effect, they need not only fine
acting and singing and a competent orchestra,
but a vast, well equipped stage and the most
* Preface to Paride ed Elena, 1770.
The Opera Past and Present
copious spectacular paraphernalia, especially a
superb ballet. They are essentially spectacu-
lar operas, and it is the prominence of this fea-
ture in them that has most militated against
their being adequately given in this country.
Gluck united in an unparalleled degree
warmth of temperament with a certain classic
reserve in expression ; he was at home in clas-
sical and mythological subjects, in the stately
classic manner ; the true " romantic " strenuous-
ness he had not, he would have made but a
poor hand at it with a Shaksperian libretto.
But it would be a dull ear that could not catch
the poignancy that lurks behind his measured
dignity of expression, a dull heart that did not
beat responsively to the expansive force of his
emotional heat. Perhaps he is at his most
poignant in his musical pictures of perfect hap-
piness ; in grief and pathos he is great, but in
serene, unalloyed bliss, greater still. There is
a deeper well of tears in the chorus of beati-
fied spirits in his Orfeo, than in " Che farb senza
Euridice?" or " Malheureuse IphigMe ! " Few
men have produced such overwhelming effects
on the lyric stage with so beautiful a simplicity
of means ; let us part from him with his pet max-
im (whether wholly true or not, matters little)
on his lips : " Simplicity and Truth are the sole
right principles of the Beautiful in works of art."
72
IV
Mozart
A SHARPER contrast than that between
Gluck and Mozart both of them men of
surpassing genius, both great in very nearly
the same line can hardly be found in History,
which, like melodrama, is rather rich in sharp
contrasts. Gluck, warm an,d impulsive in feel-
ing, was a thinker, a man of ideas, a born cham-
pion and espouser of causes ; keen of perception
and instinct, he was yet well persuaded of the
need of weighing his perceptions intellectually
and rationally, that his championship might be
efficacious. Inconspicuous as the Alceste pre-
face is as a documentary statement of art prin*
ciples, one can not but see that it represents
an immense amount of solid thinking. In short,
Gluck was a man who could be truly great
only by seconding his native genius with a
complete intellectual grasp of the why and
wherefore of the business in hand ; and, having
this grasp, he could claim entire responsibility
for everything great he did.
73
The Opera Past and Present
Mozart was his direct antithesis, as irrespon-
sible a person as can be found in the whole tale
of opera-composers, Cavalli included. Gifted
with vastly superior genius to Gluck's, he had
in very truth nothing but this genius, and the
unerring accuracy of immediate perception that
went therewith. He was decidedly an ordinary
man intellectually ; outside of his music, with-
out a single intellectual taste. Where Gluck,
impelled by a burning sense of the deficien-
cies of his early education, studied literature
and aesthetics, the whole literature, the whole
aesthetic movement, of his day left Mozart
absolutely untouched; were he alive to-day,
he would read nothing but a newspaper. As a
boy, he evinced a certain genial brightness of
precocious wit and humour; his early letters
may be accounted more than ordinarily good
boy's letters. But this precocious intellectu-
ality faded out of him with manhood ; his later
letters show a certain hard-and-fast common
sense, but of a quite conventional sort.
What most makes Mozart remarkable is not
so much the greatness as the unparalleled self-
sufficiency (in a good sense) of his genius. By
dint of sheer genius alone, backed up, to be
sure, by an exceptionally fine special, technical
education; for old Leopold, his father,, was the
best of musical drill-masters, he did what
74
Mozart
hardly another man has done with command-
ing" intellect, genius, and culture combined.
To be sure, there must have been a profound
intellectuality latent in him somewhere, for few
men have written music which furnishes the
listener and student with a greater wealth of
food for thought. No intellectual problem, so
to speak, was too high nor too deep for him to
solve musically ; but his unerring dive to the
heart of every matter was guided by sheer in-
stinct ; he perceived immediately and intui-
tively what other men had to get at by hard
thinking. Pure genius, nothing but genius
and an unsurpassed technique, was all he had in
his armoury ; and with these weapons alone he
showed himself fully up to the level of every
emergency. His fellow is not to be found in
the history of the Opera.
No bad commentary on the man's purely in-
stinctive and unreflective bent is the fact that,
with the example of Gluck and his Reform
fresh before his very eyes, he went to work
with his opera-writing as if Gluck had never
existed; he utterly ignored the Gluck move-
ment. It were wholly wrong to suppose that
Mozart began where Gluck left off; he did
nothing of the sort, he began where Gluck
himself began, and went his own way. Gluck
had a formula of his own ; Mozart had (con-
75
The Opera Past and Present
sciously) none. Yet he raised the Lyric Drama
to a height it had never attained before, which
it has reached only once or twice since. For,
hazardous as is every comparison between
works of utterly different character, it is not
too much to say that only Wagner's Tristan
und Isolde and Die Meistersinger can rank with
Mozart's Don Giovanni as completely great
works of art; nothing else in all Lyric Drama
maintains itself throughout on quite so high a
plane intellectually, musically, dramatically.
Mozart's life is not particularly interesting,
nor, save that he travelled a good deal, very
full of incident. He was born at Salzburg on
January 27, 1756, and christened Johannes Chry-
sostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus ; for a while,
as a boy, he would add his confirmation name,
Sigismundus, in his signature ; to history he has
ever been Wolfgang Amadeus (the latter being
the Latin for Theophilus). His father, Leopold
Mozart, was an excellent violinist and a tho-
rough musician, especially great as a teacher.
Wolfgang's precocity and child-wonderhood
have been much dwelt upon ; but, though cer-
tainly remarkable in this respect, he is neither
the only nor the most remarkable instance of
precocious genius on record.* True, he was
* Although Mozart had won a solid reputation as a composer
at thirteen, up to seventeen or eighteen he had produced nothing
76
MOZART.
Mozart
only fifteen when his Ascanio in Alba eclipsed
Hasse's Ruggiero in Milan ; but the old Sassone
was seventy-one at the time, and had outlived
his best powers. Wolfgang and his sister
Marianne lived the life of infant prodigies from
1762 to 1769, travelling much with their father,
the boy doing quite as much composing as
pianoforte- or violin-playing. He excited ad-
miration everywhere, wrote his first opera, La
finta semplice, in Vienna in 1768, was appointed
Conzertmeister (without salary) to the Arch-
bishop of Salzburg in 1769, and got the Sprone
tfOro (" the same as Gluck's ") in Rome in 1770.
Beside his father's teaching, he had studied
also under Sammartini (Gluck's teacher) and
the great Padre Martini ; in fact, in a technical
educational way, he had the very best advan-
tages, as indeed he has ever been recognized as
one of the most complete masters of musical
technics, form, and style. The rest of his too
short life was a hardly intermittent struggle
with poverty and the coarse misappreciation of
ill-paying patrons. On August 16, 1782, he mar-
ried the singer Constanze Weber (first cousin
of Karl Maria von Weber), after being jilted
by her elder sister Aloysia. He died of malig-
fairly comparable, for maturity of ideas and style, to Mendels-
sohn's E-flat major octet (written at sixteen), or Richard Strauss's
F minor symphony (written at seventeen).
77
The Opera Past and Present
nant typhus in Vienna on December 5, 1791.
For him, who had been chivied and put upon
by grandees for the better part of his life, an
unrecognized pauper's grave was perhaps as
fitting a Requiescat as another.
Mozart's position in the history of Opera
is so unique that he can hardly be treated
historically like other opera-composers. He
founded no school, and left no imitators behind
him ; indeed, there was nothing imitable about
him. As has been said, he raised the Lyric
Drama to an unprecedented and since unsur-
passed height by sheer force of genius, without
apparently giving the matter any thought at
all certainly no original thought. It seems
never to have entered his head that he might
have a " mission " ; he was in no sense a re-
former, like Gluck. It is not unsignificant that
almost the last libretto he set to music was by
Metastasio ! To be sure, he was no slavish
follower of precedent, and wrote exactly as
he pleased, often doing quite unprecedented
things. The second finale of his Don Giovanni
shows him with one foot thrust well over the
wall of time into Beethoven's Eroica. But he
evinced no set purpose to be off with the old
or on with the new. Like Cavalli, he was by
no means fastidious about his libretti, and took
them pretty much as they came.
78
Mozart
What he did bring to bear upon the operatic
problem little of a problem, though, to him !
was a wholly new individuality. Two new
items he certainly did introduce into opera-
writing. He was the first composer to strike
unmistakably the " modern romantic " note in
Opera ; he revived the long-dead art of musical
character-drawing. He did not create it, for
there are some rather surprising instances of
sharp musical delineation of character to be
found in Monteverdi and Cavalli, especially in
the latter ; but the " Oratorio " school had
pretty much done away with all that, and Mo-
zart gave it due prominence again. Gluck
can not compare with him in this matter ; as a
creator of " living figures of flesh and blood "
in Lyric Drama, Mozart has never been sur-
passed, and equalled now and then only by
Richard Wagner.
It is not a little remarkable that this power
of Mozart's, of putting thoroughly real-seeming
and strongly individualized people upon the
lyric stage, should have gone hand in hand
with an unconquerable, one had almost said, an
excessive bent toward ideality. True as he
was to the core, he absolutely could not help
idealizing; c'ttait plus fort que lui! As Hans-
lick once said, the rascally little Cherubino in
da Ponte's version of Caron de Beaumarchais's
79
The Opera Past and Present
Figaro turns into an actual cherub in his
hands ; the pert little village coquette, Zer-
lina, becomes absolutely angelic. Yet, such
is the genius with which it is done, you ac-
cept it all readily; you would not have it
otherwise.
Perhaps as characteristic an example as an-
other of this inveterate ideality of Mozart's,
and of the astonishing way he made it go hand
in hand with dramatic truth, is the little quin-
tet, " Di scrivermi ogni giorno " in Cosl fan tutte.
The situation is purely ludicrous : two young
officers, secretly on forbidden pleasure bent,
take leave of their sweethearts, on the pretence
of going off to the war ; a cynical old peda-
gogue, who is quite up to snuff as to the situa-
tion, stands by and can hardly keep his counte-
nance. Here we have sincere pathos on one
side, mock-heroic bathos on the other, with
sardonic derision in the middle. This little
scene Mozart has set to just three pages of
music (full score) which, while duly accentu-
ating every emotion and doing the fullest
justice to the humourous side of the situa-
tion, is as divinely angelic as anything ever
put upon paper ; on hearing it you simply feel
that
. . . he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
80
Mozart
" Angelic " is the only word for a good deal in
Mozart's music ; yet you never feel any lack of
a good solid foundation of warm human flesh
and blood.
As the due psychical counterpoise to this
idealizing bent, Mozart had a practical clear-
headedness that almost seeks its fellow in his-
tory ; and, like most thoroughly clear-headed
men, he had a phenomenally retentive and ac-
curate memory. Immediate decision and the
consequent retention of a perfectly distinct
mental picture of what he had decided upon
were perhaps his most prominent mental traits.
His peculiar method of composing shows this.
When about to compose a movement, he would
rule off page after page of score-paper with
bars ; then he would write down (either com-
pletely or sketchily, as the case might be) some
sixteen, eighteen, or twenty-four measures of
music, then skip a certain number of measures
(always carefully counted) and go on from
there. His first draft would thus be full of la-
cunae ; and, in afterwards filling these out, he
would seldom have to add or subtract a single
measure of this skeleton, nor would the pas-
sages already written undergo any alteration.
What had been the first draft would become
the finished copy ; he seldom made another.
The story that he wrote a large part of Don
81
The Opera Past and Present
Giovanni on a table in a public beer-garden, be-
tween turns at bowling, is probably true, cer-
tainly characteristic. The fact is that Mozart
hardly ever made what other composers would
call a preliminary sketch ; he would elaborate
a whole composition in his head before putting
pen to paper at all, so that his actual writing
was little more than copying from memory.
And this he could very well do under circum-
stances that would have been utterly unfavour-
able to thinking out a composition.*
Mozart wrote, first and last, some twelve
Italian and five German operas and operettas.
* This habitual method of composing is a far stronger proof of
the power of Mozart's musical memory than the oft-told story of
his writing the horn, trumpet, and kettle-drum parts of the over-
ture to Don Giovanni after sending of the MS. score, containing
only the string and wood- wind parts, to the copyist. A tolerable
feat of memory this certainly was, especially as the whole over-
ture was written in a single night, and so hurriedly that he h?.d
no time to look over the first section of the score before sending
it off. But it sinks into insignificance beside Wagner's ruling off
the bars for his clean copy of the whole first act of the Meister-
singer, without once referring to his first copy, and finding that
he had allowed just the right amount of space for the notes of
every measure in the whole act. Neither was Mozart's memory
quite so accurate in the case mentioned ; for just before the first
performance, there having been no time to rehearse the overture,
he had to say to the orchestra: "Gentlemen of the brass and
drums, at one point you will find in your parts either four meas-
ures too many, or four too few, I can't now remember which ; but*
if you follow my beat, all will come right ! "
82
Mozart
The first performed was Bastien und Bastienne,
a one-act piece, the text of which was adapted
by Anton Schacht from Weiskern's translation
of a parody on Jean-Jacques's Devin du village
written by madame Favart rather a compli-
cated authorship. This little Singspiel was
given in Vienna in the summer-house of Mo-
zart's friends, the Missmers, in 1768, the com-
poser being then twelve years old.* His last
opera, Die Zauberflote, the libretto by Ema-
nuel Schikaneder, manager of the theatre, was
brought out at the Theatre an der Wieden on
September 30, 1791, the year of the composer's
death. Thus Mozart's career as an opera-com-
poser began and ended with German works.
This fact has, however, no real significance ;
he did his greatest work in Italian Opera.
There was, upon the whole, a great deal of the
Italian in Mozart, as a musician, even more
than in Handel. He had the German depth of
Gemiith, the Teutonic seriousness and artistic
conscientiousness ; but in all else he was (mu-
sically) Italian to the core. His caste of me-
* Curiously enough, the principal theme of the overture is,
note for note, the same as the opening theme of Beethoven's
Eroica symphony only, in G major instead of E-flat major.
Was this a mere coincidence, or had Beethoven seen a score of
Bastien und Bastienne ? At all events, the Thunderer had a
way of taking his own wherever he found it.
83
The Opera Past and Present
lody is distinctly Italian ; nothing in all Opera
is more foreign to what is known as " German
singing " than his music whether to German
or Italian words. And what is true of his
vocal writing is true of his instrumental com-
positions.* Notably Italian was his complete
and facile mastery in recitative secco, that free
form of colloquial recitative that is accompa-
nied by a 'cello and double-bass, with a few im-
provised chords struck by the cembalist ; no
Italian, not even Rossini himself, could beat
him in this line. It may have been a keen ap-
preciation of the perfection of this style as a
musical medium for familiar dialogue, and of
the utter inadaptability of the German language
to anything of the sort, that induced him to
accept the conventional bastard form of the
German Spieloper set musical numbers con-
nected by spoken dialogue for his German
operas. That he made no attempt to develop
a corresponding form of German recitative is
a fact.
That Mozart came into the world without a
manifesto, and quitted it leaving none behind
him, that he showed on occasion a singularly
* Hans von Billow was once heard to say : "I had rather hear
an average first-rate Italian or French violinist play the first vio-
lin part in a Mozart quartet than any but two or three of my re-
spected fellow-countrymen."
84
Mozart
easy-going contentedness with even the worst
conventions of his day, should not be taken as
evidence that he did nothing new ; in principle
he may have done little, but in fact he did a
good deal. His enormous development of the
act-finale, the only item in which the Opera in
his hands approached the character of the Wag-
nerian Music-Drama, was in itself something
unprecedented. In general, however, what may
be called his musical formula was as unlike
Wagner's, or that of the old Florentines, as pos-
sible ; it has been found no little fault with of
late years, and people have marvelled at his
achievement of such stupendous results with
so poor a tool.
But his formula was really not quite so poor
as all that ; it suited his artistic purpose to a T.
And we should not forget that Mozart's task, in
other words, the class of libretti he had to deal
with, was radically different from Wagner's.
Wagner, notably in his later works, had to
deal with the Drama of Continuous Develop-
ment; the action goes on continuously from
the beginning to the end of an act ; nothing is
omitted, there are no lacunae in its logic ; either
it rises by gradual climax to a culminating point
at the close of the act, or else this culmination
comes earlier, to be followed by a period of
subsidence which in turn leads over to the point
85
The Opera Past and Present
of departure for a fresh climax. In either case,
there is no breach of continuity.
In the texts of Mozart's best operas, on the
other hand, we find nothing of the sort. The
libretto presents a mere succession of situations
the logical connection between any two of which
is either but summarily hinted at in the dia-
logue, or else, left wholly to the spectator's
perception. The dramatic development is no-
where continuous, but proceeds by fits and
starts, until we come to a short period of con-
tinuity near the end of an act. No doubt
the several situations in the above-mentioned
succession are culled from an ideal continuous
climax, and each one comes in in its proper
order; but the logical connection is omitted.
Whereas, in the Wagnerian Drama, the ac-
count given of the action is fully itemized, like
that in a business man's day-book, that given in
the Mozart libretti is like the one to be found
in the second column of a ledger, consisting of
a series of partial results, with most of the se-
parate items omitted. Nevertheless, by supply-
ing the logical connection for himself, the spec-
tator can obtain a certain sense of climax, much
as the listener to pianoforte-playing can get a
sense of sustained melody from what is really
nothing more than a series of well-ordered ac-
cents, without sustained musical tone. But, for
86
Mozart
him to obtain this sense of essential climax, the
succession must be rapid ; and this indispensa-
ble rapidity we surely do find in the Mozart li-
bretti, as we do also in Shakspere's plays.
Now, Mozart's musical formula a succession
of set musical numbers (solos, duets, ensemble-
pieces, etc.), with intervening stretches of secco
recitative corresponds exactly to the dramatic
formula of his librettists. Such a formula would
be ridiculous if applied to texts like Tristan und
Isolde or the Meister singer, as much out of place
as the Wagnerian formula would be with such
libretti as Figaro or Don Giovanni ; but with
these latter libretti it wo>rks to perfection, the
sense for artistic fitness is completely satisfied.
Mozart's greatest opera is unquestionably
Don Giovanni (the text adapted by the abbate
Lorenzo da Ponte from Moliere's Festin de
pierre, first given, under the composer's per-
sonal direction, at Prag on October 29, 1787).
Die Zauberflote is pulled down from this high
plane by its weak text of which no one but a
Free Mason can make head or tail while Le
nozze di Figaro (the libretto also by da Ponte,
after Beaumarchais, brought out at the Vienna
Burgtheater on May i, 1786) lapses nearly as
far by reason of a certain failure on the com-
poser's part to enter fully and sympathetically
into the "tone" of his subject. Mozart was
87
The Opera Past and Present
great, but not quite universal ; keen as was his
sense of humour, Beaumarchais's spirit of ma-
licious raillery was not \in his nature, he could
not twist his features into that sardonic, scha-
denfrohe smile.*
Curiously enough, Don Giovanni, though long
one of the most popular, f is nowadays one of
the least correctly appreciated of operas. Few
operas are habitually given so radically and ruin-
ously wrong. Both in Europe and this country
Don Giovanni'^ usually given in vast court or me-
tropolitan opera-houses, with orchestras double
or treble the size intended by Mozart (a most
necessary evil, this last, for Mozart's orchestra
would be utterly lost in a large theatre). To
counteract these two false conditions, the music
is sung, for the most part, with all the stress of
voice, all the flamboyant vociferation that be-
* In this respect, and this respect alone, Rossini's Barbiere is
far better in tune with the Beaumarchais original than Mozart's
Figaro.
\ " Let me tell you that the ' Don Giovanni ' had the greatest suc-
cess of any opera which has been brought forward, in my time, in
America." MAX MARETZEK, Crotchets and Quavers, page 102.
New York, 1855.
\ At Covent Garden in London, Sir Michael Costa used to add
trombones, tuba, and bass-drum and cymbals in the stretto of the
first finale ; and doubling the solo voices with a chorus in some
portions of this same finale is customary everywhere, save at one
theatre in Germany.
88
Mozart
long to " grand " Opera. That certain scenes
may be set effectively, the original two acts
have been cut up into three and four, and long-
ish waits come between some scenes, thus de-
stroying that rapidity of succession which is
indispensable to the sense of climax. Indeed,
the vast opera-houses, big orchestras, the ge-
neral style of singing, and the tragic grandeur
of the closing statue-scene, have all united to
give many, perhaps most, opera-goers the im-
pression that Don Giovanni is a grand opera.
This impression is radically wrong; up to
the last scene, Don Giovanni is an opera buff a
it is styled " dramma giocoso" on the title-page.
It is comedy of the most intimately subtile sort,
requiring a very small house and orchestra, that
no deft play of feature, no nimbly significant
gesture, no delicately expressive shading of the
voice may be lost upon the audience. Its gist,
as Verlaine would say, lies in the nuance, not in
the colour ; it is a work of the finest subtlety,
not of hammer-and-tongs. Then, the original
cut of acts and scenes must be scrupulously
preserved, and one scene follow hard upon the
heels of another ; the iron must never be allowed
to cool off, the audience, never be given a mo-
ment's breathing-time. Only at the little Resi-
denztheater in Munich is Don Giovanni so given
nowadays, with all the librettist's and com-
89
The Opera Past and Present
poser's intentions scrupulously carried out
only, what must the singing be ?
In Don Giovanni Mozart's power of character-
drawing shows itself in all its glory. If, in
Figaro, he has idealized some of the characters
out of all semblance to their original selves, in
Don Giovanni this idealizing process has been
carried on on lines exactly parallel with the
original bent of the several dramatis persona,
and serves but more highly to potentize their
individuality. Without losing a whit of their
identity, without being one jot less sharply in-
dividualized, they rise to the stature of univer-
sal and eternal types.
To take but one example from out of several,
think what it means for a composer to reflect
the whole of so profoundly and eternally sig-
nificant a character as Don Juan to the very
heart of his heart, and to the marrow of his
bones in that elusive mirror we call Music !
And this, too, in the jaunty, lightly-tripping
dialect of opera buffa ! This miracle Mozart
works through nearly two long acts ; then, with
sudden flight, he soars up to the loftiest sublime
of awful grandeur when, wrong and retribution
having met face to face to try conclusions with
each other, his hero, long the incarnation of
tragedy to fellow-mortals, has at last become
tragic to himself.
90
Mozart
In this second finale Mozart shows whither
his genius could lead him on an emergency ;
here he suddenly discards his familiar methods
and instinctively takes to be sure, in his own
way and style to the Wagner method. One
foot thrust over the wall of the Future into the
midst of Beethoven's Eroica, is it? Aye, and
more than that, into the midst of the Wagnerian
Music-Drama.
So far did Mozart bring it in Opera ; with a
mighty outstretch of his arms, he clasped hands
with Handel and Wagner. But, save for the
richness of the legacy he left the world, he
really affected the history of Opera not a whit.
After his death, the opera-writing world went
its own way, as if he had not been. After 1787,
the year of Don Giovanni, nothing so essentially
"modern " in conception and style as the statue-
scene made its appearance on the lyric stage
until 1865, the year of Wagner's Tristan und
Isolde.
The Italians
THE typical opera-composer in Italy during
the last quarter of the eighteenth century
was Domenico Cimarosa born at Aversa, near
Naples, on December 17, 1749, died in Venice
on April 5, 1801. Every inch a musical dra-
matist born and bred, a consummate master of
musical form, Cimarosa may be said to have
summed up in himself Italian opera seria and
opera buffa from the fading out of the last rem-
nants of the Scarlatti school up to the advent
of Rossini.
The general aspect of Cimarosa' s work is
very like that of Mozart's ; his style is simpler,
his musical developments are less extended,
his forms less varied, his use of the orchestra is
less poetic and picturesque ; but the general
physiognomy of his operas is much the same.
His fame was universal ; his Matrimonio segreto
(given first in Vienna in 1792, a year after Mo-
zart's death) was, in the opinion of the time, the
first opera buffa to dispute the thitherto unques-
92
The Italians
tioned supremacy in that field of Pergolesi's
Serva padrona. For over a generation, Ilmatri-
monio segreto was regarded as incarnating the
highest ideal of opera buffa. Cimarosa was
great, too, in opera seria ; his Gli Orazj e Curiazj
(Venice, 1794) can stand as one of the strongest
heroic operas of its day.
But, upon the whole, Cimarosa is chiefly in-
teresting now as a type of his epoch ; he had
not, like Mozart, the genius that survives, his
operas could not long outlive the changes of
fashion. Rossini fairly blew his light out.
In passing from Cimarosa to the next genera-
tion of composers in Italy, ,we are struck with
what seems very like a disruption of continu-
ity in the evolution of Italian Opera ; with
Rossini's arrival upon the stage its general as-
pect, its whole physiognomy, seem to undergo
a sudden transformation. The fact is that, even
before Rossini, the great Italian musical deca-
dence of the first half of the nineteenth century,
destined soon to acquire a terrific momentum,
was already setting in. Instrumental composi-
tion had for some time been entirely neglected
in Italy, save in the one matter of the opera
overture, or sinfonia;* the old glory of Italian
* So exclusively had this term become associated with the opera
overture in Italy that, when the present Societd, del Quartette be-
gan its symphony concerts in Florence, the only intelligible way it
93
The Opera Past and Present
Church Music was still upheld by the cheva-
lier Sard (1729-1802) alone; after him it went
pretty well to the dogs.* The only form cul-
tivated with any enthusiasm was the Opera.
The Italian operatic conquest of the then musi-
cal world was complete; Italian Opera, sung
by Italian singers, was an established fact in
France, Germany, and England, and held its
own well in competition with the home-made
article. Italy had become authorized operatic
purveyor to the world, especially to the aristo-
cratic, fashion-setting part thereof. But, with
all this enormous production and exportation
of operas, Italy had stopped importing any-
thing whatsoever of the musical sort ; even
musical ideas were stopped at the frontier.
Italy held herself absolutely aloof from the
great new musical development then going for-
ward with giant strides in Germany, shut her-
self up within her own boundaries, and de-
pended wholly upon her own resources. The
result was a sort of musical in-breeding that
made a disastrous drain upon the artistic sta-
mina of the nation, utterly uncompensated for
could find to describe a Haydn symphony on its programs was :
" sinfonia classica in quattro pezzi. "
* Fetis called Sarti "the last of the great Italian contrapunt-
ists;" to which his bosom friend, and Sarti's pupil, Cherubini
may be fancied as muttering " last but one/"
94
The Italians
by the introduction of any fresh foreign strain.
The country was sapping its musical strength
with a vengeance !
Everything suffered ; Italian musical instruc-
tion deteriorated, neither was it much heed-
ed ; for the younger generation began running
away from conservatories before its technical
education was half completed, so that the whole
musical production of the country soon began
to labour under the most terrible handicap that
can be set upon any kind of creative art, a de-
fective and inadequate technique. It did not
take a generation for the Italians to fall, as mu-
sical craftsmen, immeasurably behind the Ger-
mans, whom they had once taught. The whole
musical standard was lowered, and the land
which had once produced such unsurpassed ex-
perts in technics as Palestrina, Giovanni Ga-
brieli, and the Naninis, plunged down into the
ignominy of looking upon poor Saverio Mer-
cadante as (heaven save the mark!) a "graft
contrappuntista" Let no one rant about the
glory of pure genius and Music's speaking to
the heart ; the truth that can not be got round
is that a general deterioration in technical abi-
lity, in the ability to do, in any nation is a sure
diagnostic symptom of artistic decay.
One finds in the generation of Italian com-
posers that came after Cimarosa a marked tech-
95
The Opera Past and Present
nical falling off, evinced in a general impover-
ishment and stunting of the musical forms
employed. Especially noteworthy is the mo-
notonous paucity of these forms. The only
thorough technical mastery shown is an ad-
mirable skill in treating the human voice, and
in handling the orchestra so as to make the
voice effective. Save for this, the best that
can be said of these composers, technically
speaking, is that, with the keen practical in-
stinct of genius, they adapted themselves won-
derfully well to the situation, and attempted no
tasks beyond their powers. Genius surely was
not lacking ! But with this generation came
about the great split between Italian and Ger-
man Music operatic and otherwise ; up to and
including Cimarosa, the difference between the
two schools had been one of national tempera-
ment mainly ; now it grew into a wider and
wider divergence of artistic aim and style.
Before long, German Music got to be utter-
ly unintelligible to the average Italian, who,
whether it was a drinking-song, a symphony,
or an opera finale, shrugged his shoulders
and lumped it all indiscriminately together as
" musica di chiesa (church-music)."
The period we now come to was illustrated
by several composers of high genius, of whom
let the following five be mentioned :
96
The Italians
Gioacchino Rossini, born at Pesaro in the Ro-
magna on February 29, 1792.
Saverio Mercadante, born at Altamura, near
Bari, on December 17, 1795.
Giovanni Pacini, born at Catania in Sicily on
February 19, 1796.
Gaetano Donizetti, born at Bergamo on No-
vember 29, 1797.
Vincenzo Bellini, born at Catania on Novem-
ber 13, 1802.
Rossini was the head and front of the whole
movement. Pacini, Donizetti, and Bellini were,
in one sense, followers of ^his, in another, reac-
tionaries against his dominant tendency.* This
last fact has too often been overlooked.
What Rossini chiefly did was to perpetuate
far into the nineteenth century and with im-
mense genius, too every deplorable vice the
Opera had contracted in its Venetian and Nea-
politan periods. True, he dressed up these
vices, with inexhaustible originality, in a new
garb, but he did not cure them of their deform-
ity. The opera buffa was a thing too much after
his own heart for him not to enter naturally
and sympathetically into its spirit ; but in opera
* Mercadante deserves mention only honoris causa, as ulti-
mately the dean of the school ; he outlived the others, dying at
the age of seventy. five in 1870.
97
The Opera Past and Present
seria he let all dramatic and scenic considera-
tions go hang with a reckless insouciance that
seeks its fellow, and played into the virtuoso
singer's hand with a frankness that left nothing
to be desired.
A man of the most fertile melodic inventive-
ness, of incomparable brilliancy, gifted with
a facility that can fairly be called damnable,
Rossini enthroned graceful Frivolity in the
centre of the lyric stage, to rule autocratically
over singers and orchestra. Cavalli was no-
thing to him ! His serious Italian operas have,
to be sure, the advantage of greater superficial
variety over those of the older Scarlatti- Han-
del school; instead of an unbroken string of
recitatives and arias, they present a motley
succession of airs, duets, concerted pieces, and
finales. But in intrinsic dramatic and scenic
quality they hardly excel those of the Neapo-
litan school of the first half of the eighteenth
century, while their musical style is far less
distinguished. Semiramide (Venice, 1823) is lit-
tle better than a two-act concert in costume ;
and staid choral societies in this country found
no difficulty, in the 'forties and 'fifties, in mak-
ing Most in Egitto (Naples, 1818) go down as an
oratorio. No doubt the lack of dramatic qua-
lity in the Rossini opera seria is not quite so
total as some people nowadays would make it
ROSSINI.
The Italians
out to be ; much depends upon the style of
singing, and the old " grand " style of coloratura-
singing not over-fast, with full voice and dra-
matic stress of accent virtually went out a
good many years ago.* It is a fact that Semi-
ramide used to rank in its day as a strong dra-
matic soprano part.
Rossini simply ran coloratura, fioritura, the
trill, roulade, and every form of vocal orna-
mentation into the ground ; even his recitatives
are full of such things. He had, upon the
whole, greater fondness for bright and sprightly
rhythms than for sustained, expressive canti-
lena; true, he gave to the'world some exquisite
masterpieces of broadly-phrased melody, the
once-famous swan-song, " Assisa al pti (Tun sa-
lice" of Desdemona in Otello (Naples, 1816)
among them, but he preferred the nimbler
tempi, and often reduced the cavatina of an
aria to the dimensions of a mere introduction
to the closing rondo.
It was, however, in opera buffa that Rossini
was most royally at home and did his greatest
* Some of the present older generation can still remember
sporadic instances of it : Euphrosyne Parepa, Therese Tietjens,
Gabrielle Krauss ; its last living exponent is Lilli Lehmanrr. The
break-neck vocal agility of the strings-of-pearls, canary-bird style
of warbling came in with Maria Piccolomini and Angiolina Bosio
in the 'fifties, and has thriven to the detriment of the other since.
99
The Opera Past and Present
work. Of the delicate Mozartian subtlety he
had little, he laid on the colours thicker. But
the true comic verve he had to perfection ; a
deal of what the French call " malice;' too ; Of-
fenbach himself is not cuter. The sparkle of
his melodies, the overbrimming humour of his
recitatives, the brilliancy of his orchestra, with
the champagne-fizzing of its violin triplets and
the irresistible dash of its crescendo* all place
him in the very foremost rank of buffo compos,
ers. After all and with all his faults, he was
the greatest musical genius Italy had produced
since Alessandro Scarlatti.
It seems strange now that his Barbiere di Si-
viglia, surely the most sparkling opera buffa ever
written, if not the greatest, was damned out-
right by the public when it was brought out at
the Argentina in Rome in 1816; but this has
ever been the way with entirely great works.
Perhaps, of Rossini's whole bag and baggage,
this Barbiere is the one opera that is destined
to live into this century ; in it he shows him-
self at his very best. In Don Basilio's "La
calunnia t un venticello" he rises to a pitch of in-
* The famous "Rossini " crescendo two measures in the tonic,
repeated in the dominant, the whole gone over three times with
ever-increasing force was not really his invention. The earliest
instance of it known to the present author is in Beethoven's over-
ture to Leonore (so-called) No. I, written in 1807.
zoo
The Italians
trinsic dramatic force that is hardly outdone
by anything in Guillaume Tell* The Bar bier e
may fairly be called immortal ; its brilliance has
certainly suffered no tarnish yet. Rossini died
in Paris on November 13, 1868; for brilliancy,
dash, and a certain easy-going, ingenuous artis-
tic rascality (not a deeply premeditated ras-
cality, like Meyerbeer's), the world will pro-
bably never look upon his like again ! f
No composer goes to such extremes in any
one direction as Rossini did, without a reaction
setting in sooner or later. In his case, the re-
action came soon enough, even before his career
was over. A form of art -like the Opera has a
hard time of it ridding itself of the influence of
tradition ; the Italian Opera, in especial, had
traditions enough of its own. Two of the old-
est of these, indeed they dated back to the very
inception of the form, were expressive melo-
dy and vocal ornamentation. \ It was, accord-
* As is usual with such gems, the authenticity of the " Calun-
nia " has been called in question ; the only answer to which doubt
is the counter-question : Who else under the sun could have writ-
ten it?
t All consideration of Guillaume Tell, generally accepted as
Rossini's greatest work, must come in the chapter devoted to the
French School.
\ If what we now call melody was considerably lacking in the
first Florentine operas, it was simply because melody, in our sense
of the word, had not then been developed ; but emotionally ex-
101
The Opera Past and Present
ingly, no wonder that Rossini's younger con-
temporaries, who, after all, based their style
mainly upon his, noting his florid excesses,
should have felt
Of two such lessons, why forget
The nobler and the manlier one ?
The first to react against the over-floridness
of Rossini's style was Pacini. He preached and
practised a return to the " grand old Italian
tradition " of expressive cantilena. A man of
high repute in his day, he is totally forgotten
now ; the stronger dramatic genius of Doni-
zetti and Bellini gradually threw him into the
shade, and his works soon grew old-fashioned.
Of his seventy-five operas, Saffo (Naples, 1840)
held the stage longest. It was more by his ar-
tistic attitude than by his genius that he won a
lasting place in history.
After Rossini, the strongest men of the peri-
od were unquestionably Donizetti and Bellini.
Their contemporary fame was by no means
equal to his Rossini's world-conquest was im-
pressive vocal writing was the back-bone of the form from the
first, and the then composers made it as melodious as they knew
how just as the early Florentine painters copied Nature as
closely as they knew how. As for vocal ornamentation, only re-
member the Archilei's " gruppi e lunghi giri, " mentioned by Peri
in his Euridice preface.
102
The Italians
mediate and overwhelming; the slow rise of
Richard Wagner in our time, was as nothing,
compared to his " Veni, vidi, vici!" but they
still held their own well, side by side with him,
and eventually showed a greater power of sur-
vival. Their genius was more essentially dra-
matic than his. Perhaps it were wrong to say
that they had more dramatic power than he
could show, at a pinch ; but the dramatic in-
stinct, the dramatic mood, was more habitual
with them. They were men of constitutionally
warmer feeling than he.
One can hardly find another pair of compos-
ers whose artistic nature^and work exhibit such
curious inconsistencies. In this respect, they
are far more characteristic types of the Italian
Opera of their period than Rossini himself.
From whatever point of view they may be con-
sidered, it must be owned in the end that their
genius was distinctly emotional and dramatic ;
they had the reddest of blood in their veins, and
a very poignant faculty of expression. Yet the
musical forms in which they worked were, for
the most part, quite as undramatic and unsce-
nic as Rossini's. Their succeeding in being
dramatic in spite of it all, is perhaps the best
proof of the quality of their genius. Then,
take their style. In one sense, it was simplicity
and naturalness itself, even verging, in Bellini's
103
The Opera Past and Present
case, dangerously on niaiserie.* But, in another
sense, it was as sophisticated, as full of what the
French call rajftnement, as any known to history ;
especially so in the matter of expression, in
which it often pinched itself to absolute preci-
osity. With them, the frankest outpouring of
genuinely warm emotion went hand in hand
with a calculated appeal to a highly cultured
taste. But their passion was none the less real
for all this super-refined preciosity of expres-
sion; all the rose-water they poured upon it
could not quench its flame.
Of the two, Donizetti had the larger scope,
the more virile nature. He was also the more
careless and unequal. But, at his best, he had
no mean power. Few things on the lyric stage
are more admirably brilliant in the way of dra-
matic characterization than the prologue of his
Lucrezia Borgia (Milan, 1834) ; the music gives
you the very quintessence of the Venetian life of
the period its luxurious insouciance, its atmo-
sphere of intrigue, its undercurrent of hot pas-
sion ; it is Paolo Veronese in Music! Light
music enough, if you will, but full of matter.
Lucrezia is probably his best opera, though
Lucia di Lammermoor (Naples, 1835) has had
* It was in reference to Bellini that the late Julius Eichberg
once said: " Clarity is a precious thing; but there is no artis-
tic need of music's being clearer than crystal ! "
104
The Italians
more recognition outside of Italy ; but in Lucre-
zia he strikes and sustains a more original note,
there is more brilliancy and snap, a fiercer
dramatic blaze. For one thing, as a piece of
musical character-drawing, in the Mozart and
Wagner sense, Maff eo Orsini (in Lucrezia)
overtops anything else of the sort done in the
whole period; the elegant, devil-may-care
young rake lives and breathes before you !
Donizetti also did admirable work in opera
buffa; his Don Pasquale (Paris, 1843), though by
no means quite in the Rossini vein, can rank
with any of Rossini's, save the Barbiere alone.
But there was not a spark of fun in Bellini ;
he was great only in opera seria. Despite a cer-
tain besetting effeminacy of sentiment, too, too
naive at times, he rises now and then to an im-
pressive grandeur of which one finds little in
Donizetti. Norma (Milan, 1831) has generally
been accounted his masterpiece,* and it is per-
haps the opera in which he most rose out of
his ordinary self. But La sonnambula is more
characteristic, in a more congenial vein ; it is a
chef-d'oeuvre of sensibility. In this charming
opera (brought out in Milan in the same year
as Norma) Bellini best shows his peculiar melo-
* Schopenhauer has brought forward the libretto of Norma (by
Felice Romani) as an unsurpassed example of the dramatic treat-
ment of a tragic subject.
105
The Opera Past and Present
die power ; few melodies give a stronger pluck
to the heartstrings yet wholly without pas-
sionateness ; expressing merely the vibrant joie
de vivre of innocent, love-struck sweet sixteen
than Amina's " Come permesereno oggi rinacque
il dl ! " Here, as also in the foregoing recita-
tive, " Care compagne" we have something of
Gluck's tear-provoking power of expressing
perfect happiness.
Of course, in Donizetti's and Bellini's day,
no composers in their senses would have bitten
their own noses off by reacting too radically
against Rossini's florid style ; these two Ita-
lians were no Richard Wagners, and knew
enough not to set the whole race of singers
against them by a too ascetic return to merely
expressive cantilena. They wrote vocal flour-
ishes galore ; but theirs were, for the most
part, the natural efflorescence of an originally
simple melody, which, in their hands, blos-
somed out into flowery bedizenment, like the
apple-branches in spring ; the fioritura is pure-
ly ornamental, not the main business in hand,
as it was too often with Rossini.
Upon the whole, though, it was rather a de-
bilitating business, this Opera of sweet senti-
ment, beautiful melody, and ear-tickling; a
matter of exquisite taste rather than of sturdy
artistic vitality. For one thing, it eventually
106
The Italians
became the theme of probably the worst mu-
sical literature (written by amateurs) the world
has ever had to blush for.
Into the midst of all this rose-water preci-
osity suddenly sprang Giuseppe Verdi !
No man ever came into the world at a fitter
moment ; everything was just ready for him.
Even the most delicate palates had begun to
cloy with the Donizetti-Bellini syrup, and to
yearn for a tarter fillip ; and Verdi, of all men
in the world, was the one to give it them. A
born son of the people, his parents were inn-
keepers in the smallest of ways at the little
hamlet of Roncole, near fiusseto in Parma,
the hottest-blooded man of passion the Art of
Music had known since Beethoven, Verdi came
into Italian Opera as a veritable sansculotte.
His was a voice from the nether stratum, frank,
fierce, lurid, unheard before on the lyric stage ;
he brought into over-sophisticated Opera the
popular song (or something very like it), and
turned its siren warblings to passionate utter-
ance, his detractors said, to screaming. His
volcanic heat fairly singed the boards ; people
began to wake up, and say : Here verily is a
man !
Verdi was no better technician than the oth-
ers, no more inclined to be squeamish about
old conventions. He took the Opera quite as
107
The Opera Past and Present
he found it ; only, he breathed into it a new
spirit. The most hopelessly reticent man in
private life, the despair of prying reporters,
in his art Verdi unbuttoned freely, was out-
spokenness itself; what he said was unmis-
takable, no composer in the whole list ever
had less reserve. He was absolutely fearless
in going to all lengths, had no respect at all
for any sort of Mrs. Grundy, and, at first, little
disposition to be self-critical ; his genius, always
of a rather sombre cast, carried him by fits and
starts from majestic dignity or courtly ele-
gance to the depths of triviality and vulgarity ;
to one thing alone was he ever constant : to his
own genuineness. In time he became at once
the most popular and the most decried opera-
composer alive ; the musical plebs swore by
him, while to musicians (especially outside of
Italy) his name was a by- word for everything
artistically reprehensible. To sum him up in
a sentence, he was the diametrical antithesis of
Felix Mendelssohn.
Apart from the force of his genius, the most
noteworthy thing about Verdi has been his in-
comparable and never-flagging power of artis-
tic growth. He was born on October 9, 1813,
and is still living. This length of life has given
him the opportunity, which surely few would
have exploited as well as he, to have four di-
108
VERDI.
The Italians
stinct periods, or manners most great compos-
ers stop at their third ! In his earlier operas
Nabucco (Milan, 1842), / Lombardi alia prima
crociata (ib., 1843), Ernani (Venice, 1844), I due
Fascari^Rome, 1844), up to Lutsa Miller (Naples,
1849) he shows, with all his melodic power, a
certain formal stiffness; as good an example of
this as another is Zaccaria's aria with chorus,
" U Egitto la sui lidi" in Nabucco, a grandly
broad melody, not without impressive majesty,
but still breathing something of well-starched,
" official " formalism ; it is a little academic.
With Rigoletto (Venice, 1851) his style grows
more elastic, his melody freer and more ori-
ginal, his passion and dramatic fire burn at their
hottest. In this second period come his most
popular, as well as, in one sense, his most cha-
racteristic operas : // trovatore (Rome, 1853), La
traviata (Venice, 1853), Un ballo in maschera
(Rome, 1859), and a few others of less note.
Strangely enough, this second manner of Ver-
di's has none of those transitional characteris-
tics that mark the second period of most com-
posers ; his style is individual and fully formed,
his technique, if not conspicuous by any high
standard, is yet his own and entirely adequate
to its task. Noteworthy is a certain relaxing
of the curb of strict form, perhaps due in some
measure to the Meyerbeer influence, which
109
The Opera Past and Present
had by that time well made the round of Eu-
rope ; in the last scene in the Trovatore (surely
one of the greatest he ever wrote) we already
find the musical form conditioned by hardly
anything save a dramatic conception of the text ;
in this respect, the scene was twenty years in
advance of all else done in Italy at the time.
The apparent finality of Verdi's second man-
ner was, however, deceptive ; the man had by
no means got to the end of his tether yet! His
third was really his transition period La forza
del destino (St. Petersburg, 1862), Don Carlos
(Paris, 1867), A 'ida (Cairo, 1871). Here we find
distinctly French influence at work, also a
touch of the "new romantic" Liszt-Berlioz-
Wagner eleutheromania. A'ida may well be
compared, as a transitional work, with Wag-
ner's Lohengrin ; side by side with much that is
conventional, the final (fourth) manner is more
than foreshadowed in it. In this period Verdi's
style becomes vastly more complex ; you find
him taking unwonted pains with himself, with
his orchestra, with larger and more complex
musical developments, with the finer subtleties
of dramatic expression and local colour. In a
word, though still thoroughly an Italian, Verdi
evinces a determination not to lag behind with
the rest of his countrymen, but to show himself
as well abreast of the age.
no
The Italians
With A'ida we must now leave Verdi for a
while ; his fourth manner belongs to the pres-
ent, probably still more to the future. He has
been considered here as a man of the Donizetti-
Bellini epoch, and as the bridge that led over
therefrom to the Italian Opera of to-day.
One thing is, however, important to esta-
blish : no matter how intrinsically unscenic
were the forms of Italian Opera from Rossini to
the " younger " Verdi, the music was distinctly
written to be sung with the intensest dramatic
stress; herein it differs most fundamentally
from that of the old Scarlatti-Handel Opera.
Then, a certain amount of dramatic action is
not only possible but, so to speak, inevitable in
Donizetti's, Bellini's, and Verdi's operas ; with
a Handel aria it is simply inconceivable. So
much scenic quality the music undeniably had.
With all its conventional formality, it was re-
ally dramatic in its essence. Some very strik-
ing examples may be adduced: the quartet,
" Bella figlia" in Rigoletto, where three, aye, four
different emotions are expressed simultane-
ously, and with perfect truth to nature a feat
unparalleled in the annals of Opera! Take,
again, the final terzet, " Ferma, crudele" in Er-
nani, where the music, though of perfectly re-
gular construction, never for a moment relaxing
the strictness of its dance-rhythm, lends itself
in
The Opera Past and Present
to every subtle change of expression in the
text, and gradually swells to a lava-stream of
dramatic impetuosity. Upon the whole, it is
quite significant of the fitness of this music for
the stage that it loses more than half its zest,
and well-nigh collapses, in the concert-room.
How and why it fits the stage is not so easy to
show, but it certainly does fit it wondrous well
in its way.*
* Some points omitted in this chapter to economize space are
brought up in Chapter VIII. Vide foot-note on page 158, con-
cerning the act-finale, and also page 167.
1X2
VI
The French School
IF any nation has done its full share toward
proving the truth of the saying that, in
Opera, the comic is everywhere the more di-
stinctively national form, France has. French
optra-comique has been illustrated almost exclu-
sively by native composecs, around the heads
of many of whom Fame has drawn the aureola
of immortality no matter how perishable Time
may have proved their works to be. But, in
the list of composers who, for hard upon two
centuries, supplied the Acad6mie de Musique
the chosen home of Grand Opera in France
with works, the greatest and most /world-
famous names are, with one or two excep-
tions, not French. Rameau may fairly be rated
as a first-class man ; but the two Bertons (old
Pierre-Montan and his son, Henri-Montan),
Lesueur, M6hul, Kreutzer, Persuis, Catel, Ha-
levy, and others of less note can not stand in
history on a level with Lully, Gluck, Cheru-
bim, Spontini, Rossini, and Meyerbeer. Even
"3
The Opera Past and Present
Auber, whose Muette de Portici might be taken
as a fairish claim to fellowship with these great
foreigners, did his best and most characteristic
work for the Opera-Comique, as did also se-
veral of his above-mentioned compatriots.
But, such has been the inflexibility of French
taste, of French ideas, so irresistible the force
of French influence, when exerted near-to and
at home, that, with and in spite of all the fo-
reign genius that has been welcomed, first and
last, to the Acad6mie de Musique, the school of
Grand Opera is indefeasibly French. What
may be called the French idea has ruled
throughout. Nevertheless, the high-sweeping
scythe of cursory History will cut off, for the
most part, un-French heads !
Gluck's first successor in Paris was his pupil,
Antonio Salieri, born at Legnano in Venetia on
August 19, 1750, died in Vienna on May 7,
1835. What may be called a first-rate second-
class man, Salieri founded himself entirely upon
Gluck ; his Les Dana'ides (1784), Les Horaces
(1786), Tar are (1787), and a few other operas
served to keep the Gluck tradition fresh for
a while. Cherubini, who, unlike most of the
great foreigners, did better work for the Op6ra-
Comique than for the Academic de Musique,
may still be mentioned here as filling up the
gap between Salieri and Spontini with his
114
The French School
Dtmophon (1788), Anacrton (1807), and a few in-
tervening operas. Cherubini, however, made
something of a temporary break in the Gluck
tradition, for he held more by Mozart than by
the Viennese reformer.
The thread of the tradition is, however,
knotted again by Spontini. Gasparo Spon-
tini (afterwards conte di Sant' Andrea) was
born at Majolati in the Marches of Ancona on
November 14, 1774, and died there on January
24, 1851. After writing a number of Italian
operas of the conventional sort in his native
country, he came to Paris in 1803 ; here he sub-
mitted himself willingly to French influence,
and his style soon underwent a noteworthy
change ; it was in Paris that his great, indeed
his only considerable, period began. He ac-
cepted the Gluck formula in toto ; temperamen-
tally, too, there was no little resemblance be-
tween him and the Vienna master: he had a
similar poignancy of feeling, a similar noble
reserve in expression, the same at-homeness in
the classic atmosphere. His music, however,
strongly reflects native Italian influence ; in
some of his melodies, still more in some of his
orchestral passage-work, he even foreshadows
Rossini. Upon the whole, he can stand as a
very Italian Gluck. He was immeasurably
the strongest figure in French Grand Opera
The Opera Past and Present
between Gluck and the romantic movement of
1830; his Vestale (1807), Fernand Cortez (1809),
and Olympie (1819) lived well into the second
half of the century both in France and in Ger-
many. He was the last of the great "classi-
cists " of the lyric stage ; a man of no mean
grandeur, sombre sublimity, and dramatic
force, one who could be at white heat with
seemingly unmoved countenance. With an
ounce more of genius, of the genius that sur-
vives, his works might even now be as viable
as Gluck's own ; but, like his older fellow-
countryman, Cimarosa, he fell just short of
this mark, and the romantic movement of 1830
was the beginning of his end.
A form which has stood for over a century
and a quarter with its chief traditions unbroken
for the Gluck Reform was an enlarging and
consolidating, rather than a breaking, of the
Lully-Rameau traditions may fairly be re-
garded as settled. The form of French Grand
Opera, as we find it firmly established in Spon-
tini's time, was, in the main, this : a five-act
libretto, set in musical numbers (airs, duets,
concerted pieces, finales) with the connecting
dialogue in stately accompanied recitative (not
the more glib recitative secco of the Italians),
and with grand ballet-divertissements in the
second and fourth acts. This was the standard
1x6
The French School
norm, and departures from it were few and
insignificant; at the Academic de Musique
it was as the law of the Medes and Per-
sians.*
If the Grand Opera called tragtdie-lyrique
when the libretto conformed to the rules of the
classic French tragtdie was, in the end, but a
quasi-academic adaptation of the Italian opera
seria to French taste, the optra-comique may be
called the natural growth, in French soil, of
a slip cut from the Italian opera buffa. The
Grand Opera exemplified French taste ; the
ope'ra-comique was a perfectly natural and frank
expression of French feeling and instinct. It
even came only in part from the Italian opera
buffa; its other parent was the native French
vaudeville. Its distinctive feature was the spo-
ken dialogue connecting the set musical num-
bers ; and this owed its origin partly to the vau-
deville, partly also to the impossibility at the
time of finding a viable French equivalent for
the Italian recitative secco. In French stage
terminology, any opera with spoken dialogue
* Such a tradition dies hard, and may, moreover, acquire a con-
siderable social importance. The fiasco of Tannhauser at the
Academie de Musique in 1861 was chiefly owing to the rage of the
more influential class of patrons at the ballet's coming in the first,
instead of in the second act thus interfering with their precious
dinners !
117
The Opera Past and Present
is an optra-comique, no matter what the cha-
racter of its subject.
Two different sorts, or styles, of optra-comique
are to be distinguished : the older and the
newer. The one was but a higher develop-
ment of the vaudeville^ the other tended more
in the direction of Grand Opera. Up to with-
in, roughly speaking, twenty years of the end
of the eighteenth century, the works of Phili-
dor (1726-1795), Monsigny (1729-1817), Gretry
(1741-1813), Dalayrac (1753-1809), and others
of their school were, in general, characterized
by exceeding musical simplicity ; it was often
only by the greater proportion of music in them
that they were distinguishable from vaude-
villes ; they were strongly imbued with the
French chanson spirit. With Mehul ( 1 763- 1817),
Gluck's pupil and ardent follower, larger musi-
cal developments came in ; some of the musical
numbers, notably the act-finales, might have
shown their faces without discredit in Grand
Opera.* This tendency was carried farther
by Boieldieu (1775-1834) whose Dame blanche
(1825) is probably the only optra-comique of the
first quarter of the nineteenth century practi-
* It is significant that, some years ago, there was talk in Paris
of the Academic de Musique making an exchange with the Opera-
Comique, the former to exchange Auber's Le philtre (which was
its property) for Me'hul's Joseph (owned by the Opera-Comique).
118
The French School
cally known to most readers of this book and
reached its culmination (that is, without over-
stepping the bounds of the style) with Auber
(1784-1871) and Herold (1791-1833). There are
many things in works like Auber's Fra Diavolo
(1830), Les diamants de la couronne (1841), or
Hayde'e (1847), or He*rold's Zampa (1831) or Le
prt aux clercs (1832) that would not be out of
place at the Acad6mie de Musique.
After 1791 these two styles of ope'ra-comique
were respectively represented by two rival
theatres : the Th6atre Favart (now the Theatre
del'Ope'ra-Comique) cultivating the older, clas-
sical style, the Theatre-Feydeau, the newer,
more elaborate one. To be sure, no very sharp
line of demarcation can be drawn between the
two styles; you can find hints at the newer
even as far back as Gr6try, and many operas
savour of both. Probably the composer most
on the fence between them was Luigi Cheru-
bini (1760-1842), whose Me'de'e (1797), though
given at the Feydeau, is virtually a grand
opera, and whose Les deux journe'es known
here as The Water Carrier, and admittedly his
masterpiece carries the old style to almost
vaudeville simplicity in all the music but the
act-finales, and in these presents developments
of an extent and complexity quite worthy of the
most elaborate form of Grand Opera. Indeed
119
The Opera Past and Present
it is probably owing-, as Hanslick shrewdly
surmised, to Cherubini's pushing both princi-
ples to such extremes, thus showing the con-
trast between them as so glaring, that a work
of the exquisite genius of Les deux journtes has
failed to hold the boards all over the musical
world to this day. It fell down between two
stools !
The change destined to be worked in French
Grand Opera by the romantic ideas, generally
known as of 1830, began in 1828, when Auber's
La muette de Portici (better known here as
Masaniello) was brought out at the Academic
de Musique on February 29. This in every
sense epoch-making work came like a thunder-
clap out of the blue. Auber, who had hither-
to written only for the Opera-Comique, now
brought all the brisk, nimble dash of his style
to bear upon a tragic subject, and a subject,
too, taken straight from the heart of the people
as Wagner, somewhat too satirically, said :
" a revolution of fishermen and costermon-
gers " with no halo of classic grandeur about
it, but white hot with the breath of the pro-
letariat. And his treatment fitted the subject
to a T ; he outdid himself, showing unwonted
dramatic fire, picturesqueness in his orchestra,
and a skilful handling of choral masses (that
is, dramatically) worthy of the ablest Italians
120
The French School
of the seventeenth century. The old regular
forms of air, duet, etc., are still there ; but ma-
naged with such deftness, so full of dramatic ap-
positeness, that they are hardly noticed as such.
Eminently the most brilliant work the stage of
the Acade*mie de Musique had ever known.
Hard upon the heels of La muette followed,
on August 3, 1829, Rossini's Guillaume Tell, an
opera which may aptly be described as the ef-
fort of the composer's life. Effort is the word !
Here, too, was a romantic subject, taken from
the life of the people, or at least, from popular
(not antique) Legend, the dramatic form bor-
rowed from Schiller's Wilhelm Tell. For his
musical treatment of this theme Rossini surely
needed no more brilliancy than he had by na-
ture ; but, after thrilling the public of the Aca-
d6mie de Musique with revamped versions of
two of his harum-scarum Italian operas, Le
stige de Corinthe (1826) and Mo'ise en Egypt e
(1827),* he now took himself more seriously,
came over to the French school as far as lay
within his Italian nature, took infinite pains
with all he had hitherto been careless about,
and produced a work worthy of a great genius.
Like Auber before him, he outdid himself, if
not quite in the same way.
* Respectively, remodelled versions of Maometto II (Naples,
1820) and Most in Egitto (ib., 1818).
121
The Opera Past and Present
The effort seems to have been somewhat too
much for him. At least, how else explain the
singular course he pursued after it, a course
absolutely without parallel in history ? When
he wrote Guillaume TV//, Rossini was thirty-
seven, a strong man in perfect health and
spirits ; he lived thirty-nine years longer, to the
age of seventy-six, and Tell was his last opera,
almost his last composition of any sort! His
thus throwing up an incomparably brilliant
career, at a time when he hardly can be said to
have attained to the full development of his
powers, can not possibly have been owing to
Louis-Philippe's government refusing to ratify
a contract he had made with Charles X ; no
man of his flibbertigibbet humour could have
stuck to his huff so long as all that ! The only
plausible explanation is that, after TV//, his pride
would not allow him to return to his earlier
Italian manner, he had a keen eye for signs of
the times, and these were not consoling, while
the prospect of the hard work needed to pro-
duce more Tells was more than his laziness
could stomach. He is the only great composer
on record who ever abdicated in the prime of
life ; he preferred not writing at all to not writ-
ing easily.
Unfortunately for both La muette and Guil-
laume Tell, they were, with all their force of
122
The French School
genius, all their come-outer boldness, merely
transitional works ; moreover, the particular
march of progress they had set in motion so
soon acquired speed and momentum that they
found it doubly hard to hold their own against
it. It is no mean testimony to their intrinsic
strength that they held out as long as they did ;
they have not quite lapsed from the repertory
yet. But they were quick in growing old-
fashioned. Before the next decade was out (it
had even hardly begun !), there came along a
man to sum them both up, as far as regarded
novelty of matter or manner, and outdo them
quite. This man was Meyerbeer.
Wagner's sarcastic account of the matter was
received with outraged scorn when it first ap-
peared, but is now seen to be substantially
true.
" Meyerbeer composed operas h la Rossini in
Italy only till the great wind began to veer
about in Paris, and Auber and Rossini blew the
new gale to a hurricane with the * Muette ' and
' Tell.' How soon Meyerbeer was in Paris ! But
there he found, in the Gallicised Weber (remem-
ber l Robin des bois') * and thebe-Berliozed Beet-
hoven, active forces which neither Auber nor
* Robin des bois was what Berlioz quite rightly called an "in-
famous pasticcio " on Weber's Freischiitz, cooked up by Castil-
Blaze, and brought out at the Odeon in Paris in 1824.
123
The Opera Past and Present
Rossini had noticed, as too far removed from
their purpose, but which he, with his all-the-
world's capacity, knew very well how to value
aright. He accordingly grasped together all
that thus offered itself to him into a mon-
strously variegated, composite phrase, before
the shrill outcry of which Auber and Rossini
suddenly became inaudible ; the grim devil
' Robert' fetched them both together." *
Meyerbeer's genius has been variously esti-
mated ; forty or fifty years ago, it was rated
very high in France ; now time has consider-
ably tarnished its fabled brilliancy. But, what-
ever his genius, his influence upon the Opera,
not in France alone, but all over Europe, was
stronger and farther-reaching than that exert-
ed by any other man in the nineteenth century,
save Richard Wagner. He alone can rank
with Lully and Gluck in having ushered in a
new epoch of French Grand Opera ; of such
well-differentiated epochs French Grand Opera
as yet counts only three : the Lully, the Gluck,
and the Meyerbeer. To be sure, in comparing
him with Gluck, there is a certain notable
moral difference to be got over; Gluck was
essentially a reformer, a worshipper of eternal
Truth, while Meyerbeer was no reformer (in
* RICHARD WAGNER, Gesammdte Schriften und Dichtungen,
III, 364-
124
The French School
the Gluck sense) at all, and worshipped no-
thing but the everlasting Get-There.
Jakob Meyer Beer, known to the world as
Giacomo Meyerbeer, was born in Berlin on
September 5, 1791 (1794?), and died in Paris on
May 2, 1864. His father was a Jew, of the rich
banker sort. He studied under Franz Lauska,
Muzio Clementi, old Zelter (Mendelssohn's
master), and finally under the abbe* Vogler.
As an opera-composer, he at first imitated
Weber, then (after studying vocal writing in
Italy, by Salieri's advice) took up with the ex-
treme Rossini style ; his Crociato in Egitto (Ve-
nice, 1824) may be called as good a reproduction
of the Rossini manner as exists. But his ear-
lier operas (in his first and second manners)
are historically unimportant.
In 1826 he went to Paris.* Here he stopped
composing for a while, and began to make a
careful study of French literature and art,
above all, of the French character ; these four
years, 1826-30, marked the turning-point in his
career. He was eminently a man of enterprise,
a born eclectic, unsurpassed in his faculty for
turning every opportunity to account ; Paris
gave him food for thought. There were La
muette and Guillaume Tell ; there was the new
* That is, before, not, as Wagner implies, after the production
of La muette and Tell.
125
The Opera Past and Present
Berlioz orchestration, vehemently discussed
at the time, but descriable by the discerning eye
as big with a whole great future for the Art of
Music, not yet applied to the Lyric Drama ;
there were, in churches and conservatories, end-
less old contrapuntal subtleties, long neglected
by composers for the stage ; best of all, there
was, as Wagner has said, a new wind blowing,
it was good weather for inventive audacity !
Meyerbeer plodded quietly on, catching idea
after idea, and silently perfecting a whole new
scheme of Opera ; he was plainly not satisfied
until he had the plan complete in his brain,
well thought-out in every detail. For, when he
took to active composition again, we find his
third, or " grand," manner fully formed ; he
had no transition period.
The work in which he embodied the results
of those four years of thinking and study was
Robert le Diable, brought out at the Academic
de Musique on November 21, 1831. The man-
ner was quite new ; a most composite style, if
you will, a mosaic style, made up of bits taken
from about every composer who had anything
worth taking, but and here is the miracle !
thoroughly personal and individual. No mat-
ter how great or how small a genius, there
was one force which Meyerbeer indisputably
possessed : the force of sharply defined indi-
126
MEYERBEER.
The French School
viduality; whencever he may have got an idea,
once it had passed through his brain, it came
out bearing his mark. No musical style was
ever more composite than his ; none more un-
mistakably the composer's own.
No doubt, other folk's ideas got more or less
distorted in the process, and perverted from
their original meaning. Often, what had been
an irrepressible expression of a composer's in-
most self was turned into a mere bid for effect.
Meyerbeer was a man of no artistic conscience,
and his artistic honesty was more than du-
bious ; take him in the most charitable way, if
Effect was really his god', he served that god
with perfect single-heartedness.
Few operas have made so strong a first im-
pression upon any public as Robert le Diable
made in Paris in 1831. Success is not quite
the word for it ; cela faisait explosion, it made a
tremendous noise in the world, was discussed,
pro and con, with a vigour that left no one in
doubt as to the work's being, at least, some-
thing ! Whether great or puny, admirable or
outrageous, it was clearly no nothing -at -all.
The style was so new, and hence so incompre-
hensible at first, that everyone connected with
the rehearsals singers, players, conductor
predicted a flat failure. But, when the open-
ing night came, the excitement of the audience
127
The Opera Past and Present
was so irrepressible and contagious that, after
the duet, "Sifaurai ce courage?" in the third
act, Adolphe Nourrit, who sang the part of
Robert, lost head completely and, from sheer
madness of nervous tension, took a desperate
header down a trap - door that was open by
mistake luckily falling upon a mattress, and
so saving his neck.*
Jt is difficult for us now to appreciate how
new Robert was in 1831. It seems old-fashioned
enough to-day ! But look at the duet between
Alice and Bertram, " Mais Alice, qu'as-tu done?"
in the third act, and think of what an audacity
of originality it took to offer those suppressed
intermittent whisperings, strung on the barest
thread of a melodic idea, to a public brought up
on Spontini, Cherubini, Auber, and Rossini ! It
must have seemed the very impudence of crass,
unacademic realism. Take the unaccompanied
terzet, "Fatal moment ', cruel my stir e" in the same
act, where a parody on the four-voice cadenza in
Beethoven's ninth symphony compelled a whole
public to applaud to the echo what, in Beet-
hoven, they had scouted as incomprehensible.f
* The author has never seen this anecdote in print ; it comes
orally from an eye-witness.
t At a rehearsal of the ninth symphony in Boston, some years
ago, a certain musician was overheard muttering, after the famous
quartet-cadenza, " There goes one of Meyerbeer's strongest claims
to originality ! "
128
The French School
Robert is, after all, Meyerbeer's freshest and
most original work. In Les Huguenots (1836) the
style is more matured, there are moments of
deeper inspiration passages in the duet, " O
del! ou courez-vous ? " between Raoul and Valen-
tine, in the fourth act, have won sincere homage
even from Wagner but the first bloom is wiped
off. In Le Prophlte (1849) maturity of style
already degenerates into mannerism ; it out-
Meyerbeers Meyerbeer. All that can be said
of LAfricaine, his last opera (1864), is that, if
no less mannered than the Prophtte, it shows
greater heartiness of inspiration. In Robert le
Diable there is a superior freshness of melodic
invention, more genuine dash and brilliancy.
With all his deplorable elasticity of artistic
conscience, his flirting, now with grandeur,
now with courtly elegance, and anon with down-
right vulgarity, Meyerbeer did the Opera no
little good technical service. He loosened the
bonds of musical form, and, though not quite
obliterating the old landmarks, did much to
render traditional forms more scenic. What
most composers before him had done only in
the act-finale he did at any point in an act
where he saw a chance of making the music go
hand in hand with a continuous dramatic de-
velopment, no matter how brief. He obtained
many of his dramatic and scenic results, to be
The Opera Past and Present
sure, more by an extension than by a sacrifice
of the old forms ; but this was, after all, what
most of his predecessors had done in the act-
finale.
His style, composite as it was, was in the
main essentially dramatic ; nevertheless he did
not discard the Rossini coloratura, over which
his early Italian studies had given him a certain
mastery. He was particularly fond of giving
his second soprani generally queens or prin-
cesses, of but secondary dramatic importance -
intrinsically florid parts ; his dramatic heroines,
on the other hand, seldom have anything purely
ornamental to sing, save in closing cadenzas;
he seems to have felt that he could ill afford
to withhold this concession to the vanity of
singers.
Meyerbeer also did noteworthy work in
optra-comique, though he could never quite rid
himself of a certain ponderousness, not wholly
in accord with the genre. But nothing he did
was in vain ; and, if there had been no Etoile du
Nord (1854) or Pardon de Ploermel (1859), there
surely would never have been a Bizet's Carmen.
In the last analysis, the Meyerbeer Opera
was just as characteristic an expression of the
romantic spirit of 1830 as Victor Hugo's and
Dumas's dramas, Alfred de Musset's poetry,
Dekcroix's canvases, Berlioz's symphonies, or
130
The French School
Chopin's pianoforte -music. It was virtually
the Durnas Drama set to music,* and had all
the flaunting virtues and unnatural vices of that
school. If it was something very different from
the Wagnerian Music-Drama, this was simply
because nothing like the Wagnerian Music-
Drama could possibly have sprung from the
order of ideas which formed the point of
departure for the 1830 movement in France.
The most that can be expected of a tree is to
bear its own fruit !
Meyerbeer's chief follower was Jacques-
Fromenthal Halevy (1799-1862), a man of far
greater sincerity and warmth of feeling, but of
considerably less force. His reputation was
very high in his time, both in and out of France,
but only his La Juive (1835) remains on the ac-
tive list to-day, f
* Eugene Scribe happens to have been Meyerbeer's librettist,
but that does not matter.
t Wagner tells a significant and instructive anecdote about La
Juive (the great Richard was a man of imagination, and one
never knows quite how far to trust him in matters of fact ; but
this story bears all due internal evidence of truth). When Du-
prez was to succeed Nourrit in the part of ^leazar, he asked
Halevy one day at rehearsal if he might not hold back the tempo
a little in his great phrase, " O ma fille chfrie," in the first finale,
as he found that he could make no effect with it at the general
tempo of the movement (Allegro brillante). Halevy willingly
granted his request ; the news of this concession made by com-
131
The Opera Past and Present
The first native-born Frenchman, since Ra-
meau, to win a higher reputation at the Acade-
mic de Musique than at the Op6ra-Comique
was Charles Gounod, born in Paris on June 17,
1818, died there on October 19, 1893. Formally
and technically, he did nothing new ; in these
matters he was purely and simply a follower of
Meyerbeer, as none but the mightiest original
genius could well have helped being in his
time ; for the Meyerbeer cult in France from
1840 to 1880 was as general and enthusiastic as
the Mendelssohn cult in England ; Meyerbeer
ruled unquestioned and supreme. But Gou-
nod did bring in a new personal temperament ;
he was the great love-poet of the French lyric
stage in the nineteenth century. Not particu-
larly profound in feeling, but none the less ge-
nuine, well-nigh fanatical in his sincerity, he
could mirror in his music all the dreamy ecstasy
of a refined sensual passion purely sensual,
but thoroughly refined.
Gounod was really a one-work man, though
box-office keepers may tell you another story ;
all he really had to say he said in his Faust (first
given at the Theatre - Lyrique on March 19,
poser to singer was soon bruited abroad, with the result that, be-
fore long, this phrase was dragged out to a slow Andante in every
opera-house in Europe. Many, if not most, operatic "tradi-
tions " have a very similar origin.
132
The French School
1859, then, after making the round of the world,
at the Academic de Musique on March 3, 1869,
as a grand opera, with added ballet in the
fourth act). His other surviving opera, Rome'o
et Juliette (Academic de Musique, 1867), needs
only to be compared with Faust to show the
limitations of the man's genius. In a discon-
nected succession of dramatic situations, with
few characters (Faust), he was completely at
home ; in a strenuously developed drama, like
Rome'o et Jidiette, with multitudinous opportu-
nities for drawing character, he was out of his
element ; out of his element, too, with the
heavier orchestration demanded by the Acade*-
mie de Musique for remember, Faust was
originally written for the smaller Theatre-Ly-
rique. A small, tenuous voice, not devoid of a
certain searching sweetness, Gounod has been
listened to with delight for hard upon half a
century ; he even managed to make a sort of
epoch of his own in a small way. But, save for
his individual temperament, he left no mark
upon the history of Opera; his formula was
still the Meyerbeer formula, if somewhat re-
laxed as formulae have a way of relaxing, with
the course of time. Gounod did not add a
fourth to the trio of men who left the deepest
impress on French Grand Opera : Lully, Gluck,
and Meyerbeer.
133
VII
The Germans
EIGHTEEN years after the production of
C Mozart's Don Giovanni in Prag, there
came in Vienna another notable first perform-
ance : that of Beethoven's Fidelio at the The-
ater an der Wien on November 20, 1805.
If Beethoven (1770-1827) wrote only one
opera, he was clearly determined that that one
should be a lion ! Probably no other opera
in the whole list was ever so worked over by
its composer as this Fidelio, oder die eheliche
Liebe.
The text was originally adapted by Joseph
Sonnleithner from Jean-Nicolas Bouilly's Lto-
nore, ou r amour conjugal, which had been twice
set to music : first, in the original French, by
Pierre Gaveaux (1761-1825), and brought out
at the Feydeau in Paris on February 19, 1798;
then in an Italian translation, by Ferdinando
Pae'r (1771-1839), and given in Dresden on Oc-
tober 3, 1804. By no means a great text, of
eternal significance, like that of Don Giovanni,
134
The Germans
but a mere bit of sentimental-heroic Melo-
drama, thoroughly bourgeois, a play for mon-
sieur Poirrier to weep delicious tears over.
The best that can be said of it is that it is good
of its kind.
As at first given, Beethoven's opera was in
three acts, the overture being the one gene-
rally known as the " Leonore No. 2 " ; it was
withdrawn after three performances. The li-
bretto was next given to Stephen Breuning to
work over ; he reduced it to two acts, and the
opera was given in this remodelled shape, with
a new overture, known as the " Leonore No. 3,"
at the Imperial Privat-Theater on March 29,
1806; it was again withdrawn, after two per-
formances. There was some talk of giving the
opera in Prag in 1807, and Beethoven wrote the
overture known as the " Leonore No. I " for the
purpose ; but the plan came to nothing. At
last the libretto was given to Friedrich Treitsch-
ke for a second revision, Beethoven also re-
modelling his score; in this final shape the
opera was given, with the overture known
as "to Fidelia" (in E major), at the Karnthner-
thor-Theater on May 13, 1814.
Fidelio was the second great opera in the
form of the German Singspiel (that is, with
spoken dialogue), Mozart's Zauberflote being the
first. If Beethoven showed little distinction of
135
The Opera Past and Present
taste in his choice of libretto, he certainly made
up for it in his treatment ; Fidelio is unquestion-
ably the greatest German opera between Mo-
zart and Wagner. It is as idle to compare the
music with that of Don Giovanni though this
has too often been foolishly done as to com-
pare the two libretti. Fidelio is as thoroughly
German as Don Giovanni is Italian. But its
falling short of the Don Giovanni mark is chief-
ly owing to the composer's well-nigh fanatical
fidelity to his libretto : of that unvarying level
of the highest sort of opera buffa, suddenly ris-
ing at the close to the sublimest heights of
Lyric Tragedy, which characterizes Mozart's
masterpiece, we find nothing; Beethoven lets,
not only his expression, but his very style fol-
low the text, step by step ; the music accord-
ingly keeps oscillating between good, comfort-
able ope'ra-comique and the most impassioned
tragedy for, when the strenuous moments
come, Beethoven takes his melodramatic text
quite seriously, and writes music on a level
with any greatest lines you please in ^Eschylus,
Sophocles, or Shakspere. Then, at the end,
when all is over, he suddenly throws off the
stage shackles really shackles to him, as they
never were to Mozart and launches out into a
jubilant cantata (you can call it nothing else, it
can not be acted to) in the ninth symphony
136
The Germans
vein,* as if fairly drunk with the joy of being
once more on his own ground.
It is in its music, and in that alone, that
Fidelio is great ; and, compared with the ex-
quisite finish of vocal and orchestral writing in
Don Giovanni, this music is as if hewn out with
a broad-axe. Of Mozart's admirable science in
writing for the human voice Beethoven had
little ; he is known to have said once : " Singers
ought to be able to do anything, except bite
their own noses ! " But, in spite of its lack of
homogeneity of style, there is not a moment
in the music that is not great in its way ; for
one thing, the outburst,*"^ schlagt der Rache
Stunde" near the close of the " Pistol "-quartet
in the second act (after the trumpet-calls), is
probably the most overwhelming moment of
sheer unbridled fury in all Opera. When it
came to passion, Beethoven could make the
best of them look small. With all its shortcom-
ings, this uncouth cub of a Fidelio is still a lion !
It is, after all, only because of its intrinsic
greatness that Fidelio has any historical im-
portance ; there was nothing new in it, save
*The librettist has even paraphrased the lines, " Wer ein
holdes Weib errungen, mische seinen Jubel ein ! " in Schiller's
Ode an die Freude, which Beethoven afterwards set in his ninth
symphony, changing them to " Wer ein holdes Weib errungen,
stimm' in unsern Jubel ein"
137
The Opera Past and Present
the Beethoven temperament ; it marks no
epoch. It is only eternal.
But something new was soon to come ; the
German Romantic Movement was in the wind.
This new departure in German Music, and espe-
cially in German Opera, should not be con-
founded with the so-called movement of 1830
in France. This latter, which embraced all the
fine arts and belles-lettres generally, was, in the
last analysis, a revolt against the classic; not
only against the formal principles of classic
Art, but against well-nigh all classic artistic
habitudes and points of view. For the Renais-
sance revival of the Antique, it substituted a
modern revamping of the Middle Ages ; the
traditional themes of the Drama, in particular,
were transformed, and its ethical gist, as Nie-
tzsche would say, transvalued. The inexorable-
ness of Fate could, to be sure, hardly die out
as a dramatic mainspring; but Patriotism and
Duty after Fate, the most important themes
of the classic Drama were superseded by
Passion.
Of all this, little is to be found in the Ger-
man romantic Opera ; in Germany the Roman-
tic Movement meant merely a discarding of
traditional tragico-heroic subjects in favour of
subjects taken from national, or even local, folk-
lore. Practically the most conspicuous item in
138
The Germans
it all was the prominent part played by the
supernatural element; without the superna-
tural, folk-lore is no longer folk-lore !
The heads of the new romantic school were
Weber and Spohr.*
Louis Spohr was born in Brunswick on April
5, 1784, and died in Cassel on November 22,
1859. With his reputation as a great master of
the violin we have nothing to do here ; he in-
terests us simply as an opera-composer, and, in
this field, his reputation equalled any in Ger-
many in his time. After writing three operas
which were still-born, he brought out Der Zwei-
kamph mit der Geliebten in Hamburg in 1811.
Of his eleven operas, Faust (1818) and Jessonda
(1823) are the most famous ; his last, Die Kreuz-
fahrer, was given in Cassel in 1845.
Karl Maria, Freiherr von Weber, was born at
Eutin in the grand-duchy of Oldenburg on
December 18, 1786, and died in London on
June 5, i826.f After passing from one teacher
* Weber was, at first, unhesitatingly credited with originating
the movement; later, this credit was given to Spohr, because his
Faust (produced in 1818) antedated Weber's Freischutz (1821).
But this specious argument is stultified by the fact that, though
Spohr 's Faust was completed five years before its production (that
is, in 1813), Weber had written his Rubezahl (unfinished and
never brought out) for a theatre in Breslau as early as 1806.
t It has already been mentioned that Weber was first cousin to
Mozart's wife ; it may also be of interest that, with the exception
139
The Opera Past and Present
to another (Michael Haydn was among them),
he, like Meyerbeer, completed his musical
studies under the abb6 Vogler. After writing
(more or less completely) three operas which
never saw the foot-lights, he brought out his
Sylvana in Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1810 a
year before Spohr's Zweikampf. But his repu-
tation could not fairly be called national before
the production of Der Freischiitz in Berlin in
1821, and its subsequent triumphal progress all
over Germany. This was followed by Euryan-
the (Vienna, 1823) and Oberon (London, 1826).
Der Freischiitz was in every sense an epoch-
making work ; it marked the first unquestion-
able victory scored by the new romantic school.
To understand the impression it produced in
Germany, we must appreciate what had been
the operatic conditions in that country when
Weber and Spohr came upon the scene, and
what those conditions were in their day.
Up to the close of the eighteenth century,
native operatic production in Germany was in
of the Bachs, he had the longest musical pedigree of any note-
worthy composer on record. Philipp Emanuel Bach and his
brothers belonged to the fifth consecutive generation of profes-
sional musicians in the direct line of descent. Karl Maria von
Weber belonged to the fourth generation of musicians in his fa-
mily the first two of these being, however, represented by ama-
teurs.
140
The Germans
much the same case as in France : it had only
one foreign rival to compete with, the imported
Italian article. But the difficulty of this com-
petition was far more serious in Germany than
in France ; the Italian composers who came to
Germany did not turn German in their music,
as Gluck, Cherubini, Spontini, Rossini, and
others turned French in Paris ; and, with the
beginning of the new century, a fresh set of
rivals sprang up the French themselves. The
importation of French operas began, while that
of Italian operas in no wise diminished.
Among a host of more or less important fo-
reign names may be mentioned Ferdinando Pae'r
(1771-1839),* who, as court Kapellmeister to the
Elector of Saxony, ruled over the Hofoper in
Dresden from 1801 to 1806; Cherubini (who,
though Italian by birth, must count as half-
German, half-French as a composer) was in
Vienna from 1805 to 1808, where his Faniska
(Karnthnerthor-Theater, 1806) made such a suc-
cess that it was deemed excessive praise to
Beethoven's Fidelia to predict, as someone did,
that, one day, it would " rank as high as Cheru-
bini's Faniska" and Beethoven himself recog-
nized Cherubini as the leading opera-composer
of the day. Spontini was called in 1820 to the
*He Teutonized himself to the extent of signing his name
" Par " while in Germany.
141
The Opera Past and Present
Hofoper in Berlin, and brought his Vestale and
Cortez with him.* Beside the personal pres-
ence of these crowned representatives of the
Acad6mie de Musique and the Opera.-Comique,
the importation of French operas soon began
to assume very considerable dimensions. What
with having to compete with both Italians and
French, and in vernacular translations, too,
to be understood by the vulgar, German com-
posers were hard put to it.
There was nothing to offend or unsettle Ger-
man habits in the French ope'ra-comique , for its
form (with spoken dialogue) was the same as
that of the native Spieloper. This was not quite
true of Italian Opera, when sung in the original
tongue ; but the Germans adapted both the
opera seria and the opera buffa to their taste
easily enough in translated versions, by sub-
stituting spoken dialogue for the "unaccom-
panied " recitativo secco. But French Grand
Opera in which all the recitative was of the
" accompanied " sort, for which no spoken dia-
logue could be substituted with any semblance
of fidelity to the original was a new and unac-
customed form to the German public ; for the
* The operas he wrote especially for Berlin Nurmakal, oder
das Rosenfest zu Kaschmir (1822) and Agnes von Hohenstauf-
fen (1829) fall after the Weber period at least, after his
death.
142
The Germans
old Reiser school was long since a thing of the
past, and forgotten. An opera in which every-
thing was sung presented a new problem for
German perspicacity to struggle with ; for,
whether naturally gifted with a keen dramatic
sense or not, this public had formed the habit
of at least wishing to understand what it heard
in the vernacular, and singing was not favour-
able to easy comprehension.* It is probably
owing to this insatiate thirst for understanding
on the part of the public that the form of the
German Spieloper was as long-lived as it was ;
a form bastard in itself, and especially, even
ludicrously unfit for the treatment of heroic
or highly poetic subjects. In France it never
rose higher than the optra-comique.
This unfitness which seems to have escaped
Mozart's perception completely, as it did also
Beethoven's was felt keenly by both Spohr
and Weber, especially as they had the better
French example under their very noses in
* It is characteristic at once of German economy and of the Ger-
man desire to understand things that the opera-libretti published
in Germany (for the benefit of opera-goers) contain, as a rule, only
the text of the musical numbers and recitatives, but not that of
the spoken dialogue which everyone is expected to understand
without following, book in hand. The standard formula on the
title-page is, not the title of the opera, as with us, but " Lieder
und Gesange aus (Songs and Vocal Pieces from) " whatever the
opera may be.
143
The Opera Past and Present
Gluck's operas and others still more French.
No doubt the Freischutz owed part of its suc-
cess to its Spieloper form ; Weber's genius, the
homelike quality of the legend on which the
text was based, the general sylvan atmosphere
of both text and music,* were also for much in
this success ; but it was nevertheless the putting
of these familiar things in the familiar way that
unfailingly brought the work home to the popu-
lar heart. Still, Weber was not blind to the
imperfection of the form. Both he and Spohr,
apparently without collusion, determined to
remedy it. In the year 1823 were brought out
the first two entirely " durchcomponierte " (set to
music all through) German operas since Keiser :
Spohr's Jessonda, in Cassel on July 28, and
Weber's Euryanthe,in Vienna on October 25. f
Neither experiment was a success with the
public, who, though willing enough to forgive
that sort of thing in foreign operas (as an
irremediable product of Gallic perverseness),
kicked lustily against it in a work of native
growth.
This matter of recitative vs. spoken dialogue
was really of no small importance ; and it is
highly probable that the German objection to
* The average German can be brought to the verge of tears by
the mere mention of the word Wald !
t Here, at least, Spohr has the priority by three months !
144
The Germans
giving up the latter was not based solely upon
its being more easily understood by the listener.
To go to the root of the business, we must re-
member that the so-called "accompanied" re-
citative (recitativo stromentato) was a common
property of every form of Opera, in Italy,
France, and Germany, whereas the recitativo
secco was purely Italian. The Italians were the
only people who had devised an appropriate
style for the musical setting of familiar, collo-
quial dialogue ; and this style was the ra-
pid, flexible recitativo quasi-parlando (or almost
spoken recitative), which was free from all re-
straint from musical rhythm, and had become,
by long convention, less bound by considera-
tions of tonality than any other known form of
composition.* In the delivery of this sort of
recitative, rhythm and emphasis depended
solely upon the rhetorical sense of the text, the
singer was free to use the same diction (as the
French say) that he would in ordinary speech.
The accompanied recitative, on the other hand,
was a much more heroic business ; all opera-
writing nations seem to have agreed, as by
common consent, that it was applicable only in
" It is significant that, as far back as Handel, one seldom finds
any "signature " (indication of key) at the beginning of a secco
recitative ; the composer set out with the expectation of changing
key frequently and at short notice.
145
The Opera Past and Present
the "grand style"; there was nothing collo-
quial about it.
The (real or supposed) incompatibility of the
French and German languages with anything
like the Italian recitative parlando which, after
all, only carried the natural sing-song of South-
Italian (Neapolitan or Sicilian) speech an inch
farther in the musical direction was one of the
reasons why the French took to the make-shift
of spoken dialogue in their optra-comique, and
the Germans, in every sort of Opera. Both
felt that there were many situations in Opera
where the more magniloquent accompanied
recitative would be out of place ; and for the
homelier Italian form they could find no better
substitute than bare spoken dialogue. More-
over, as time wore on, and traditions crystallized
into habits, French and German singers, having
had to do only with accompanied recitative, got
to associate a certain grandiosity of manner
with every sort of musically set dialogue or
monologue ; so that, had composers sought to
introduce a more colloquial style, there would
have been little chance of their having it fitly
sung.*
* Particularly instructive on this head is what Berlioz writes
about his experience with the recitatives he had written to take
the place of the spoken dialogue in Weber's Der Freischiitz, for
the production of that opera in French, under his direction, at the
146
The Germans
Now, the German public, being accustomed
to have nearly all the important part of the
story of the opera told them in (generally ra-
ther homely) spoken dialogue, naturally re-
sented having it told them in stately recitative,
which, beside rendering the text less easy to
understand, was often too evidently grandiosely
out of place, and took up an unwarrantable
amount of time. For neither Spohr nor Weber
gave them anything corresponding to the Ita-
lian parlando, but followed the more orotund
French model.
Still other causes, too, militated against the
experiment's being accepted as successful.
Spohr, with all his virtues, was not a genius of
the epoch-making sort, not a man to shake the
Academic de Musique in 1841 spoken dialogue being against
the rules of the house. " I never could get the singers to aban-
don their slow, heavy, bombastic way of singing recitative ;
especially in the scenes between Max and Caspar did their deli-
very of the essentially simple and familiar conversation have all
the pomp and solemnity of a scene of Lyric Tragedy." (Mtmoires,
328.)
Wagner (Ges, Schr. u, Dicht., I., 287) writes of this perform-
ance: " The way in which the recitatives were sung increased in
no small degree the weight of blame cast upon them ; all the sing-
ers thought to have to do with Norma or Moses, they brought in
throughout portamenti, tremolo-nuances, and such like noble
things."
These recitatives of Berlioz's, by the way, were probably the
first attempt at doing anything colloquial in that line in French.
147
The Opera Past and Present
world out of old habits ; and Weber, who cer-
tainly was, had the ill luck to find, in Euryanthe,
about the most deplorable libretto that can
be imagined. If Mozart's music could float
Die Zauberflote, Weber's certainly could not
float Euryanthe ; the self-complacent Helmine
von Chzy had hardly put worse balderdash
upon paper when she cooked up the book of
Rosamunde, in five days, for Franz Schubert.
Neither was the text the only trouble ; Weber
betrayed something of the 'prentice hand in
his recitatives, he did not fall easily and na-
turally into the vein, and gave little evidence
of that dramatic power which he showed in his
grand scenas in the Freischutz and Oberon. The
best that can be said of his experiment is that
it was a well-meant, if rather blundering, move
in an artistic direction.
But, if, in this instance, the will was some-
what better than the deed, Weber's service to
Opera in other ways was none the less conspi-
cuous. He brought as Cavalli did before
him, in Venice, if not quite in the same way the
popular element into serious Opera, and the
form itself closer to the hearts of the German
people. This Mozart, one of the most intrinsi-
cally aristocratic geniuses in all Music, had
never done ; neither had Beethoven notwith-
standing the bourgeois quality of the Fidelio-text
148
The Germans
done it much more than he. But in Weber's
melody, no matter how broad in style or ela-
borately ornamented, you get all the romantic,
out-of-door freshness of the Suabian folk-song,
the peculiarly Teutonic sentimentality in its best
expression ; one might almost say he wrote in
dialect. And if, in this, he did the Opera good
service in Germany, he did other things, of a
technical sort, the influence of which was far-
ther-reaching. He effected a sort of inter-
weaving of the scena * with the aria that did
much to relax strictness of conventional form,
and rendered the form more scenically plastic.
The so-called Incantation - scene in the Frei-
schiitz even reaches out toward the Wagnerian
Music-Drama, almost as much as the Statue-
scene in Don Giovanni. It positively terrified
contemporary pedants ; but, when someone
* The term scena is applied to an accompanied recitative of
more than usual length and dramatic quality, often (but not ne-
cessarily) containing passages in the arioso style. Donna Anna's
recitative " Era gia alquanto avanzata la notte," which debouch-
es into the aria, " Or sat chi Ponore" in the first act of Don Gio-
vanni, is a transcendent example of the older form of scena.
Leonore's " Ascheulicher ! wo eilst du hin?" in Fidelia, is an-
other. Of Weber's intermingling of the scena with the aria,
Max's " Nein ! Idnger trag' ich nicht die Qualen," and Agathe's
" Nie nahte mir der Schlummer," in Der Freischutz, and Rezia's
"Ocean ! thou mighty monster," in Oberon, are conspicuous ex-
amples.
149
The Opera Past and Present
showed it to Beethoven, that appreciative great
man said : " If the scene was to be set to
music, I don't see how it could have been done
in any other way." In this scene Weber shows
all his romantic deviltry ; probably no other
composer in the whole list ever supped with
the Devil with so short a spoon. Upon the
whole, the supernatural was an element very
congenial to him ; few composers have treated
it so to the manner born, with so little of the
melodramatic, as he. The fairy music in Obe-
ron stands unapproached ; well might Wagner
exclaim : " Compared with those fairies, Men-
delssohn's* are, at best, flies!" As a mere
matter of record, perhaps not uninteresting as
such to Anglo-Saxons, be it said that Weber,
the German, wrote the only modern English
opera that can in any way stand in the first
class : Oberon ; or, The Elf - King s Oath (to a text
by James R. Planche, brought out at Covent
Garden in London on April 12, 1826, not two
months before the composer's death).
It is, after all, more by his interweaving of
the scena with the aria than by his banishing
spoken dialogue that Weber did the best service
to the Opera in Germany, and elsewhere. In
this dramatic extension of the aria and of cog-
nate ensemble forms he was most especially
* In A Midsummer Nighfs Dream.
150
WtBER.
The Germans
imitated by Meyerbeer in France ; indeed, this
sort of thing was one of the chief items in the
Meyerbeer formula.
If Euryanthe, in spite of much admirable mu-
sic, was a failure, Der Freischiitz was surely not ;
it made an epoch in German Opera, and imi-
tators were not wanting. Among Weber's
followers, two are important : Heinrich Marsch-
ner (1796-1861) and Peter von Lindpaintner
(1791-1856). These were men of a certain
amount of genius ; though their works hardly
crossed the German frontier, they held the
stage long and prosperously throughout Ger-
many ; their operas were not mere " Kapell-
meister work." Marschner was decidedly the
stronger of the two ; his Der Vampyr (Leipzig,
1828), Der Templer und die Jildin (the libretto
after Scott's Ivanhoe ; ib., 1829), and especially
his masterpiece, Hans Heiling (Berlin, 1833),
must rank not far below Weber's operas.
Lindpaintner's talent was of a more ordinary,
showier cast; his best-known works are Der
Vampyr (Vienna, 1829) and Lichtenstein (the
text after Wilhelm Hauff's novel ; Stuttgart,
1846).*
* In a book like the present, many a subject of secondary im-
portance must perforce be treated summarily ; such a subject is
the German comic Opera, or Singspiel. Although filling quite an
enormous place in the national artistic life, it has been absolutely
15*
The Opera Past and Present
without influence upon anything outside of Germany, or upon the
higher forms of classic and romantic Opera in Germany itself.
With the exception of Mozart's thrice-admirable Entfiihrung aus
dem Serail (Vienna, 1782), Otto Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber
von Windsor (Berlin, 1849), and Ignaz Briill's Das goldene Kreuz
(ib., 1875), exceedingly few works of this order are known outside
of Germany ; most of the older ones of the school have passed
into the antique-curiosity stage, and are more than dead now.
Let the following list of composers and characteristic operas do
duty for anything further on the subject :
Josef Haydn (1732-1809), Der neue krumme Teufel (Vienna,
1752) ; Johann Adam Hiller (1728-1804), Der Teufelist los (Leip-
zig, 1766), Der Dorfbarbier, Die Jagd (ib., 1772); Karl Ditters
von Dittersdorf (1739-1799), Doktor und Apotheker (Vienna,
1786); Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752-1814), Hanschen und
Gretchen (Konigsberg, 1772), Das Zauberschloss (Berlin, 1802);
Peter von Winter (1754-1825), Das unterbrochene Opferfest (Vi-
enna, 1796) ; Joseph Weigl (1766-1846), Die Schiveizerfamilie
(Vienna, 1809); Konradin Kreutzer (1780-1849), Jery und
Bdthely (Vienna, 1810), Das Nachtlager in Granada (ib., 1834);
Franz Schubert (1797-1828), Der hausliche Krieg (Vienna, 1861) ;
Albert Lortzing (1803-1851), Czar und Zimmermann (Leipzig,
1837), Der Wildschutz (ib., 1843), Der Waffensc hmied zu Worms
(Vienna, 1846); Ignaz Briill (1846 still living), Das steinerne
Herz (text after Hauff ; Prag, 1888).
152
VIII
Wagner
AFTER Scarlatti and Handel, Gluck ; after
Donizetti and Meyerbeer, Wagner born
in Leipzig on May 22, 1813, died in Venice on
February 13, 1883.
He began as anything but a reformer; his
first viable opera, Rienzi (brought out in Dres-
den in 1842), was nothing but an Acad6mie de
Musique grand opera in five acts. Indeed^ it
was written especially for the great Paris
house, though never accepted there ; and the
style of its music is closely modelled upon that
of the then reigning Grand Opera favourites in
France : Spontini, Meyerbeer, and Donizetti.*
* Donizetti's Les martyrs and La favorite were produced at the
Academic de Musique in 1840; the latter is still in the repertory
to this day.
Wagner's two earlier operas Die Feen (written in 1833, but
only brought out posthumously in Munich in 1888) and Das Liebes-
verbot (Magdeburg, 1836) have no historical importance. A
certain biographical importance they surely have, if only in show-
ing how unsettled Wagner's artistic convictions were in his youth ;
Das Liebesverbot is written mainly in imitation of Bellini of all
men in the world !
153
The Opera Past and Present
It is virtually a Meyerbeer grand opera, writ-
ten with more sincerity, full of youthful exces-
siveness in every direction, but lacking the
highly-developed Meyerbeer technique. It was
Wagner's first and last work of the sort.
In his next opera, Der fliegende Hollander
(Dresden, 1843), he quite abandoned the French
model, and turned back to Germany and
Weber. To be sure, he gave up spoken dia-
logue, a far safer experiment in the 'forties
than in the 'twenties, but, if there had never
been a Freischutz, there never would have been
a Hollander. Yet, notwithstanding the strong
Weberish streak in this opera,* there is less
homogeneity of style in the music than in any
other of Wagner's works; beside the Weber
influence, there is, at times, distinctly that of
French opera-comique.\ All these borrowings
are, however, recognizably coloured with Wag-
ner's own individuality; now and then you
* There is an almost perplexing variety of Weber in it : Weber
very nearly pure and simple, only slightly Wagnerized ; Weber
Spontinified and Meyerbeerized (Senta's and Hollander's duet,
" Wie aus der Feme langst vergang 1 ner Zeiten," in the second
act); Weber Donizettified (Erik's cavatina, " Willst jenes Tag's
du nicht dick mehr entsinnen ? ") ; and what not else.
t The spinning chorus, the chattering little chorus of girls,
" Ste sind daheim!" and, above all, Daland's air, ll Mogst du,
mein Kind" which last may be described as indifferent good
Mehul.
154
Wagner
even get Wagner pure and simple.* Tech-
nically speaking, the musical forms are very
considerably relaxed ; more, upon the whole,
than in any opera of Meyerbeer's. The sepa-
rate numbers are often, so to speak, ravelled out
at the ends, that they may be woven together
into some semblance of a continuous whole ;
only a semblance as yet, but Wagner is plainly
coming to himself.
He took a good while to do it, though ; in
his next opera, Tannhduser und der Sdnger-
krieg auf Wartburg (Dresden, 1845), ne makes a
new experimental throw of the dice. Wagner
was essentially a man of- vast ideas, most com-
fortably at home in "large frames," as the
French say. In Tannhduser we have what is
intrinsically a romantic opera masquerading
in the guise of Grand Opera ; although only in
three acts, it is on the largest French scale.
Shortly before his death, Wagner called it:
" meine schlechtste Oper (my worst opera) " ; and
not wholly without justice. The musical style
is more homogeneous than in the Hollander,
but Weber still stands largely in the fore-
* Notably in Senta's ballad, " Traft ihr das Schiff im Meere
an?" though with the last outburst (Allegro con fuoco\ " Ich
set 'j, die dick durch ihre Treu' erlose /" Weber stands out more
prominently than ever. A comparison of this passage with
Agathe's "Air meine Pulse schlagen," in Der Freischiitz, will
leave no doubt on this head.
155
The Opera Past and Present
ground. A most strangely transmogrified
Weber, however: at times pretty thoroughly
Wagnerized,* but, for the most part, washed
over with a coat of the most bourgeois sort of
German thoosy-moosy, redolent of the merely
Bdnkelsdnger spirit of men like Franz Abt and
F. W. Kiicken ! Never before nor since did
Wagner strike so essentially vulgar a vein of
melody. What saves Tannhduser is the beau-
ty of the story, the complete sincerity of the
music, and Wagner's unerring dramatic touch
which last he had by nature. The technique,
however, is still rather feeble, except in the
matter of a skilful handling of material means
the orchestra and choral masses ; the score is
defaced by some mere school-boy clumsinesses,
which were called Wagnerish at the time, but
are now seen to be anything but that. Yet in
Tannhduser we do descry at times the beginning
of Wagner's third manner ;f developed with
* As in Tannhauser's song to Venus, and in one or two of the
songs in the Singing-Contest (Walther's and two of Tann-
hauser's).
t Especially in Tannhauser's Narrative, ' ' Inbrunst im Herzen,"
in the third act, and all the ensuing struggle between him and
Wolfram before the opened Venus Mountain. Remember, by the
way, that the now authorized " Paris " version of the first Bac-
chanale and the scene between Tannhauser and Venus was written
some fifteen or sixteen years later (after Tristan) and is no crite-
rion of the style of the original opera.
156
Wagner
no very conspicuous technical skill, but already
wiping out all traditional musical forms ; here
the plastic form of the music is based upon
nothing but the dramatic development of the
scene.
With Lohengrin (Weimar, 1850) comes a mag-
nificent change. It is still romantic Opera pa-
rading as Grand Opera ; but of the Abt-Kiicken
melodic roture there is no longer a trace ; the
musical style is distinction itself. Weber al-
most disappears ; what there is left of him is no
more than the little occasional touch of Haydn
to be found in the works of Beethoven's second
period. For the first time, Wagner succeeds in
raising his music to the full level of his poetic
conception ; the vehicle is worthy of the load ! *
The third manner crops up, too, in a far more
developed condition in the opening scene of
the second act (Ortrud and Telramund on the
church steps by night). Lohengrin was em-
* The score of Lohengrin is, in one particular, an interesting
commentary on the absolute naivete of Wagner's mental attitude
toward old conventions. A convention was never bad in his eyes
because it was conventional, but merely because it was intrinsically
bad. One of the old fashions most laughed at by the come-outers
of Wagner's time by Berlioz, Liszt, and himself was the fre-
quently recurring perfect authentic cadence. Yet Lohengrin may
be called a very apotheosis of the perfect cadence ; there are nearly
as many perfect cadences in it as in a Handel oratorio, or an opera
by Cimarosa.
157
The Opera Past and Present
phatically Wagner's transition opera ; after it,
he left the " Opera " entirely for the Music-
Drama.
It was Lohengrin that fully opened Wagner's
eyes to what he wanted. And, now that we
have followed him so far in his career, we can
see how very purblind his vision in this matter
had been. Taking the ground, both by instinct
and rational conviction, that the Opera must
be primarily a form of Drama, and only se-
condarily a form of Music, he was some time in
discovering the way in which he personally
could best make it a worthy form of Drama ;
Rienzi, the Hollander, Tannhduser, and Lohengrin
were but experiments to this end, and experi-
ments, too, guided by no particularly definite
theoretical hypothesis.*
* One point in all these operas is exceedingly hard to explain,
unless it be explicable by the strong hold convention and example
still had upon Wagner. He wrote all his own libretti, and so
could not fall back upon his text as an excuse for any dramatic
shortcoming. It is accordingly very curious that, even up to
Lohengrin, he should so frequently have followed one of the least
commendable Italian examples : in what may be called the de-
dramatization of the act-finale. In Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini,
and the younger Verdi is often to be found a most signal falling-off
from the high standard set by Mozart in this matter. Instead of
that extended period of continuous dramatic development which
we find, say, in both the finales in Don Giovanni, these Italians
give us, for the most part, act-finales built on the aria plan : con-
sisting, after some essentially dramatic preluding, of a concerted
158
Wagner
But between the productions of Tannhduser
and Lohengrin came his exile, for participating
in the revolutionary business of 1848, and flight
to Switzerland. Here he had leisure to think,
to account to himself for those artistic instincts
for which he had hitherto found no adequate
form of expression, and to formulate his theory
of the Music-Drama. In this period fall the
writing and publication of Das Kunstwerk der
Zukunft and Oper und Drama, his principal
theoretico-controversial works. But what best
helped to open his eyes was what he had done,
and left undone, in writing Lohengrin.
What his opened eye's saw clearly was, up-
slow movement, followed by a quick one, with just enough dra-
matic business intervening, logically to explain the change of
tempo. It is like the confidante's consolatory philosophical reflec-
tions'after the prima donna's cavatina, that give her the desired cue
for her cabaletta. During neither slow movement nor stretto does
anything dramatic happen ; these two movements are intrinsically
nothing but concert -pieces sung in costume. Now, for just this
undramatic sort of act-finale Wagner shows a considerable fond-
ness in his "operas." Characteristic instances are the second
finale in JRienzi, the first and second in Tannhduser, and the first
in Lohengrin. He does this sort of thing decidedly oftener than
Meyerbeer. To be sure, he also follows the better Mozart model
say, in the fourth and fifth finales in Rienzi, the third in both
Tannhduser and Lohengrin and even his undramatic finales can
not truly be said to be " out of situation " ; they are amply justified
by the text. But it seems nevertheless strange that a man of his
dramatic aspirations should have given himself the opportunities
he did to write them at all.
159
The Opera Past and Present
on the whole, this.* Ever since Marc* Antonio
Cesti, emulating his master Carissimi's exploits,
had driven the operatic chariot into that Orato-
rio no-thoroughfare (in Venice, about 1649), no
composer had had the radical insight and skill
to back the hapless vehicle out again. Man
after man had sprung to the horses' heads and
tried to turn them back, to make an exit in that
dignified fashion. But there was not room
enough to turn round in ; there the chariot
stood, a stone wall across the end of the pole,
musical haberdashery shops on either side, ad-
vance and retrogression alike impracticable ;
for, with the heavy load accumulated while in
the cul-de-sac, backing was out of the question.
Then came Gluck, who, after lightening the
load a bit, throwing out ornamental frippery,
four-times-repeated words, needless ritornelli,
and the like, gave such a sturdy tug at the
reins that his team really did back half-way
out ; but there he stuck fast. The Opera still
remained virtually what Cesti had made it : not
a Drama with auxiliary Music, but a Dramma
per music a a Drama for (the sake of) Music.
Wagner was the first to see clearly what the
true state of the case was : that there was no-
thing for it but to throw out the whole load that
* It may be as well to say at once that this is the author's, not
Wagner's own, statement of the case.
160
Wagner
had been accumulated during two centuries'
lingering in that hopeless no-thoroughfare
all, save one thing alone ! and then back the
lightened chariot the whole way out. Throw
to the four winds of Orcus well-nigh all that
had been gained in two centuries, and start
afresh on the open highway from what point,
think you ? From precisely the point whence
the Florentine Camerata and Peri and Caccini
had set out in 1595. With this important dif-
ference, however: whereas Caccini and Peri
had the whole Art of Music lying before them
in the problematical condition of a new-made
tabula rasa, with no technique at their beck at
all adequate to grapple with the problem, Wag-
ner had a whole two centuries' development of
technique ready-made to his hand which tech-
nique, moreover, he purposed considerably
augmenting for his own behoof. The Wagner
Reform was, as Carlyle said of the French
Revolution, a sudden return to primordial con-
ditions, but with all the appliances of civiliza-
tion.
When it takes a book of over four hundred
pages to expound a theory of the Music-Drama,
that theory is not easily epitomized in a few
paragraphs. Yet the task is not quite so
impracticable as it looks. Oper und Drama,
Wagner's theoretical magnum opus, is full of
161
The Opera Past and Present
redundancies, of poetico-philosophical specula-
tions, hair-splitting- meticulosities, and hazy
dreams. With due insight for a reagent, an
enormous mass of useless matter can be pre-
cipitated out from it, leaving a clear solution of
artistic principles, not over-hard to deal with.
Upon the whole, Oper und Drama is the work of
a man who had not got over the first splenetic
teeth-gnashing at his exile, who, for the first
time in his life, had set himself to think out his
problem to the bitter end, and, being by nature
more poet than philosopher, had the nimblest
faculty for taking pregnant hints from every-
thing that caught his notice, and that un-
quenchable, na'if enthusiasm which impels the
amateur logician to swear by every wildest de-
duction he may have drawn from his premisses.
Wagner gave ample evidence, in after life, of
how little finality he imputed to his Oper und
Drama ; the book really marks but one stage
in his mental and artistic growth, and takes
points of view which he considerably outgrew
later.*
* Compare, for instance, the dogged obstinacy with which he in-
sists, in Oper und Drama, upon the popular Myth, or Legend,
being the only fit material for a drama, with the frank ebulliency
of his reply (at Bayreuth, in 1882, the first Parsifal year) to a cer-
tain musician who had expressed a preference for his Meistersing-
er over all his other works: "Yes!" cried he, "you maybe
163
Wagner
Stripped of its dialectic trappings, and with
its metaphysical convolutions straightened out,
Wagner's theory is briefly this. In any sort
of Drama, whether musical or otherwise, the
play's the thing ; and, in the Music-Drama,
the music must lend itself unreservedly and
continuously to intensifying the emotional ex-
right, there; you see, the Meistersinger was, after all, an inspira-
tion, it came straight out of the blue ; no rummaging about among
musty old myths was needed to make that ! "
Again, as a fair example of the amateurish futility of much of his
reasoning, take his theory of the Supernatural in the Drama. His
argument (much condensed) is this. In real life, every act of
ours is the result of a well-nigh 'endless chain of causes, and is
hence not thoroughly comprehensible until all these causes and
their interconnection are known. For setting forth such a causal
chain to explain the actions of his dramatis persona the drama-
tist has no time ; the novelist can do it, but the dramatist can
not. Yet a work of art must be able to make itself understood im-
mediately and through and through ; nothing in it must seem un-
accountable. So the dramatist has to condense the whole chain of
hidden causes into one immediately visible and comprehensible
cause, which, from this very process of potentization, must needs
appear as supernatural. An excellent explanation of the function
of the Supernatural in the Drama, if you will ; but so utterly need-
less ! Everyone in his senses knows, unless he be an impenitent
realist, that the Supernatural (in modern romantic Drama, at least)
is always symbolical ; and most of us are perfectly ready to recog-
nize its symbolism. But Wagner, who, with all his romanticism,
was a pretty hard-and-fast realist at bottom, could not rest content
with his equally inborn fondness for the Supernatural until he had
argued himself into the paradox of recognizing it as a realistic
necessity.
163
The Opera Past and Present
pression of the text, and to giving an illustra-
tive colouring to the dramatic action. In the
end, aye, and even down to minute details,
it is the theory of the old Florentine Camerata,
and nothing else under the sun.
As to the practical means by which Music
can best fulfil this its allotted mission, two
points in Wagner's theory are noteworthy ;
the first fundamental, the second more adven-
titious. The first point is that Music must
abandon all those forms which were devel-
oped, not so much from its own intrinsic na-
ture as from its first application to human uses
that is, from the Dance and assume only
such plastic forms as spring naturally and free-
ly from the nature of the dramatic subject it
seeks to illustrate. The second point is what
is known as the Leitmotiv.
Be it said at once that the Leitmotiv idea
the association of a theme, or musical phrase,
with a particular personage, idea, or incident
in a drama was not original with Wagner;
neither do we find anything new in his use of
it until we come to his third manner.*
* Manifold attempts have proved the hopelessness of trying to
discover the first appearance of the Leitmotiv in dramatic music.
Let only two pre-Wagnerian instances of it be mentioned here.
In Mozart's Don Giovanni, the duel between the Don and the
Commendatore is accompanied in the orchestra by a series of
164
Wagner
The episodic use of the Leitmotiv was no new
thing ; and all that distinguishes Wagner's use
of it in his earlier operas from Rienzi to Lo-
hengrin is that it is more frequent than is to
be found in other composers. But, in the last
struggle between Tannhauser and Wolfram (in
the third act of Tannhauser), still more, in the
scene on the church steps between Ortrud and
Telramund (in the second act of Lohengrin), we
begin to find something of the use Wagner
makes of the Leitmotiv in his later music-
dramas. This use is no longer merely episodic,
but distinctly functional. In Wagner's third
manner, almost the whole web of the music is
woven out of Leitmotiven ; they come either
rapid ascending scales, alternately in the first violins and the
basses ; these scales suggest the quickly-alternating sword-thrusts.
In the closing scene of the opera, when the statue of the dead
Commendatore has got the libertine hero by the hand, and is urg-
ing him to repent, these same scales return in the orchestra but
now only in the basses, the violins (Don Giovanni's sword) being
silenced, showing this second, ideal struggle between the two
combatants to be merely one-sided.
Again, in Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable, when Alice, Robert's
foster-sister, calls his attention to the likeness between his friend
Bertram and the Fiend's face in the picture of St. Michael and the
Dragon in the old church in her native village, the orchestra takes
up the theme of Raimbaut's ballad, " Jadis rjgnait en Norman-
die ," in which the young pilgrim had previously told the story of
Robert's birth and infernal parentage. The listener sees at once
that Bertram is the Evil One in person, and Robert's father.
165
The Opera Past and Present
singly and in succession, or else simultaneously
and interwoven.* There is no melodic con-
stituent of the music that is not a Leitmotiv-
This gives the music, if not greater dramatic
force, at least an unflagging dramatic sugges*
tiveness.
Such was Wagner's theory in its main out-
lines ; of details like alliterative verse, infi-
nite melody, and das Reinmenschliche in general,
nothing need be said here.f This theory he
applied fully in all the works of his third pe-
riod the Nibelungen tetralogy, Tristan und
Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, and Par-
* A particularly complex example is the closing stretto in C
major of the great love-scene between Siegfried and Briinnhilde,
in the third act of Siegfried. Here the music is woven out of five
distinct Leitmotiven.
t The elaborate treatise on the Stabreim (alliterative rhyme) in
Oper und Drama is but another proof of how much more Wag-
ner had the artistic than the philosophico-critical temperament, in
his readiness to elevate any passing fad into an eternal truth. He
was already at work on the text of Der Ring des Nibelungen ;
and the appropriateness of the old Teutonic Stabreim to the poetic
treatment of a subject taken from the folk-lore of the race would
naturally not escape him. But he used the Stabreim only in the
Ring ; his other texts (on Romance subjects) are in ordinary
rhymed verse, occasionally in blank verse.
As for "das Reinmenschliche (the Purely Human)" about
which he talks so much, one may agree with Immanuel Flohjager
that, in Wagner's conception, it differed little, in the last analysis,
from Don Giovanni's " sostegno e gloria d'umanita." (Don Gio-
vanni, Act II., scene 14.)
166
Wagner
sifal; the practical artistic expression of it
was his third manner.
And now, apart from all considerations of
theory, also apart from all questions of indivi-
dual style, exactly what was the fundamental
principle of this third manner of Wagner's, as
a musico-dramatic method ? Considered from
this point of view, we find the third manner
to be little else than a higher development of
something quite old, of a method largely em-
ployed by the Italians of the first half of the
nineteenth century, and traceable back at least
as far as Mozart if not considerably farther.
Both Mozart and the Italians who came after
him often wrote passages in which the musical
development was carried on entirely by the
orchestra, while the text was delivered by the
singers in a style which ran (according to the
nature of the sentiments to be expressed) all
the way from the bald rhetorical colloquialism
of the recitative secco to the more dramatic stress
of " grand " recitative, and even to the poignant
expressiveness of distinctly melodic phrases.
Considered from a purely musical point of
view, the only connection between the voice-
parts and the orchestra was that the two went
well together ; but what the orchestra played
was a self-consistent musical development, not
in any true sense an accompaniment ; the voice-
167
The Opera Past and Present
parts oscillated between the purely rhetorical
and the musically significant. The prototype
of the Wagnerian method is to be found in the
first part (Allegro) of Leporello's " Madamina, il
catalogo % questo" and Don Giovanni's " Meta
di voi qua vadano" * Of course, the musical
style is very different indeed ; but the musico-
dramatic method is essentially the same. The
whole business is but a higher musical develop-
ment of the old recitative stromentato ; a higher
dramatic development was hardly possible.
If Wagner's third manner is found fully de-
veloped in Das Rheingold (the first of the Ring
dramas, written in 1853-54), we do not find his
style completely matured and individualized,
nor his technique fully grown, until we come to
Siegfried (the third drama of the Ring tetra-
logy, begun in i857).f Completely Wagnerian
* Other examples of this sort of thing are : nearly the whole of
the first part of the finale (No. 9) to the second act of Donizetti's
Lucia di Lammermoor (up to the beginning of the sestettino,
" Chi mi frena ? ") ; the first few pages of the final quartet (No.
23) in Verdi's // trovatore (up to Leonora's " Prima che d'altrui
vivere"). Such passages are common enough with composers of
that school.
^ It has generally been deemed convenient to date the full devel-
opment of Wagner's musical individuality and technique with
Tristan (begun in 1857, after stopping short half-way through
the second act of Siegfried) ; but the full development of style
and individuality stares one in the face from the very first page of
168
Wagner
though the method may be, there is not a little
in Das Rheingold and Die Walkure that is not
wholly Wagner's; not only are some of the
themes appropriated from other composers,
having not quite the true later-Wagner ring,
but even up to far on in Die Walkure does one
find now and then a distinctly Meyerbeerish
detail.* Wagner, like other great men, had a
way of taking his own where he found it ; but,
with Siegfried, he began to find it only in him-
self.
Siegfried. Not the faintest difference in style is to be detected
between the first and second halves of Act II. (the second half was
not begun till 1865 ; that is after the whole of Tristan und Isolde
and most of the Meistersinger had been written); whereas a
marked difference in style is to be noted between the third act of
Die Walkure and the first of Siegfried.
As a matter of mere technique, compare the whole musical de-
velopment of the scene between Brunnhilde and Siegmund (Die
Walkiire, Act II., sc. 4) with that of the very similar scene be-
tween The Wanderer and Mime (Siegfried, Act I, sc. 2), and see
how vastly more secure is the technical skill shown in the latter.
* One of the Rhine-daughter themes is taken from Men-
delssohn's Schone Melusine ; the theme beginning at Siemund's
" Der dir nun folgt^ -wohin fuhrst du den Helden?" (Walkure,
Act II., sc. 4) comes from Marschner's Der Vampyr. The sob-
bing figure in the 'celli under Briinnhilde's " War es soehrlos, was
ich beging, dass mein VergeWn nun die Ehre mir raubt?" (Wai-
kiire, Act III., sc. 3) is nothing if not very familiar and character-
istic Meyerbeer. Wagner owed much to Meyerbeer from the first,
and only succeeded in ridding himself entirely of his influence
with the beginning of Siegfried.
169
The Opera Past and Present
Not the least merit of Wagner's third man-
ner is its wondrous flexibility and adaptability.
It can lend itself to every conceivable kind of
drama, from the most exalted tragedy to the
broadest farce. In its more colloquial phase it
becomes the first German substitute for the
Italian recitative quasi-parlando ever discovered,
a fit musical vehicle for homely dialogue. Nor
does it lose caste amid the grandest and most
elaborate musical developments. It is at once
thoroughly dramatic and thoroughly musical.
The general consensus of the world seems
to be to-day that Wagner's greatest works are
Tristan und Isolde, the infinite tragedy (brought
out in Munich in 1865), and Die Meister singer von
Niirnberg, the homely comedy (originally con-
ceived as a satirical counterpart to Tannhduser,
brought out in Munich in 1868). These two
are probably the only works for the lyric stage
which, for poetry and intellectuality of concep-
tion, perfection of execution, vividness of cha-
racter-drawing, and general wealth of genius at
its highest, can justly be ranked with Mozart's
Don Giovanni. Of the two, Tristan may be
deemed the more temporal and evanescent, it
sums up the whole nineteenth century, the
whole " Now " of artistic feeling ; Die Meister-
singer has more of the monumental, of the eter-
nally valid.
170
Wagner
If it is difficult to determine which was the
dominant bent of Wagner's genius, the musi-
cal, the dramatic, or the poetico-picturesque,
one can hardly escape recognizing the domi-
nant trait of his character to have been com-
bative energy. He was a born fighter; with
his well-nigh excessive craving for human sym-
pathy, his character was distinctly militant.
Adverse criticism hurt him sorely ; it seemed
to him a wanton refusal of that sympathy
which, his whole nature told him, he had a
right to demand of the world. But it spurred
him on, was the stimulant which his militant
genius most needed. Indeed, one can hardly
help suspecting that the opposition he met with
during the better part of his life may have been
for something in shaping his work, and that
much therein might have been different with-
out it.* He was not in the least an intellectual
hermit, could not live happily out of commu-
nion with the rest of mankind. Not that his
thirst for sympathy ever led him to alter his
course by an iota for the sake of winning it,
there was not a grain of diplomacy in his com-
position, and he carried firmness to the pitch of
obstinacy, but that, he looking instinctively
upon sympathy as his natural right, it set his
* In this respect, Wagner was very like another militant genius,
who, in most others, is his diametrical opposite : Emile Zola.
171
The Opera Past and Present
moral teeth on edge to find that, where he had
asked for bread, he was offered a stone. He
found the whole world out of joint, and was
fully persuaded that he was the predestined
man to set it right. Opposition was but fuel
to his energy. With every successive work he
brought forth, he seemed to say to the world :
You found that, in my last work, I had gone
too far in my chosen direction ; well, here you
will see that I have gone still farther ! *
Probably the finest practical illustration of
Wagner's indomitable energy and faith in him-
self was his conception and carrying-out of the
Bayreuth scheme. This was to be the setting
* Nothing could have shown more characteristically Wagner's
craving for sympathy, his inflexibility in face of opposition, and
also a certain naive inability of his to look at things otherwise than
from his own point of view, than his writing Tristan und Isolde
in 1857. He was half-way through the score of his Nibelungen-
Ring, and interrupted his work because he felt an imperative need
of renewing his relations with the general public, which had been
severed ever since Lohengrin ; and the completion, let alone the
production, of the Ring seemed then in a very dim and distant
future. He accordingly set to work upon something which he
thought would easily renew his relations with the public at large,
something "simple and easily brought-out," not even requiring
the paraphernalia of a court opera-house. And this work was
Tristan, which was given up in despair, as "impossible," after
nearly sixty rehearsals at the Vienna Hofoper, and, when at last
produced in Munich, called forth a shriek of utter dismay from all
but a few determined adherents. It was probably the direst dis-
appointment of his life.
172
Wagner
right of a disjointed world, as thorough a de-
struction and reorganization of social operatic
conditions as his Music-Drama itself was of the
artistic form of the Opera an event quite
unique in the history of that form of art ! *
Seemingly wild as this Bayreuth scheme was,
Wagner's energy made it a success at least,
in so far as he actually brought the Festspiel-
haus and the performances into being. Well-
nigh everything at Bayreuth was new : a new
form of Lyric Drama was there to be given
under new conditions ; it was to be the death-
knell, not only of the old Opera, but of the old
Opera-House as well. *
In speaking of Bayreuth, one enters upon
delicate, quasi-political ground. The institu-
tion already has a history, but does not quite
belong to history ; it is still active. Yet Bay-
reuth has been so important a factor in the ar-
tistic life of the world for hard upon a quarter
of a century, that it is impossible not to try to
sum up the main results of the experiment
so far.
* Unique, yes as a whole. But how old some details are !
Remember how, at Bayreuth, the beginning of every act is an-
nounced by apposite Leitmotiven, played on brass instruments.
Well, at the performance of Monteverdi's Orfeo, in Mantua in
1607, the signals for raising the curtain were every time given
by trumpets.
173
The Opera Past and Present
Like the only other institution in the world
which at all resembles it (if with some impor-
tant differences), the Come'die - Franchise in
Paris, Bayreuth has helped teach one valuable
lesson : that the first principle of all dramatic
performance whatsoever is infinite painstaking
and sinking the individual in the cooperative
mass. To this principle Bayreuth has been
unswervingly true from the first ; this, too, has
been the prime element in what artistic success
it has had.
As a repository for firmly-established, au-
thentic, and authoritative traditions, on the
other hand, Bayreuth has been considerably
a failure. Yet such a repository Wagner in-
tended it primarily to be ; this was perhaps
the part of his dream he had most at heart.
That he, of all men, should have thought such
a dream realizable seems strange ; for, of all
men, he best knew how traditions are formed,
and how they are (not) perpetuated. But the
thing seemed to him so indispensable that he
could not but believe it possible.
If anything in this world is perishable, liable
above all else to. deterioration and falsification,
that thing is what is called a " tradition of per-
formance." No true artist feels himself legiti-
mately bound by it ; and, in this matter, true
and sham artists unfortunately agree. A work
174
Wagner
of art may be what we call " eternal," good for
a very considerable time ; but a style of per-
formance, no matter how authentic, is in its
very nature transitory; the world, sooner or
later, outgrows its validity. A style of per-
formance which is really admirable always
reflects something of the spirit of its own time ;
in this way only can it be fully intelligible,
comprehensible. And it may truly be said
that the surest test of a work of art's having
some of the eternal essence in it is its power of
adapting itself, in its voyage down the centu-
ries, to successive, ever-changing styles of per-
formance. If a work of art reflect, or embody,
nothing more than the special spirit of its own
time, then is its span of life measured ; for it is
only by being ever fresh and new that it can
hope to live. And, if it does so keep itself
new, the new style will fit it as well as the old ;
nay, better, for it will be the most faithful
mirror of its newness. Not anchylosed tradi-
tion, but keen, profound, vital understanding is
the surest guide to the correct performance of
such works as Wagner's music-dramas. And,
if authentic traditions are no sure guide, what
shall be said of unauthentic, or falsified ones?
In so far as regards the establishment of
authentic traditions, Bayreuth may well be
said to have been a failure from the beginning.
The Opera Past and Present
Only through Wagner's succeeding in com-
pletely realizing his ideal could it have been in
any degree a success. And, even in the per-
formances given in his own lifetime at Bay-
reuth, Wagner really fell considerably short of
his ideal.* With a few distinguished excep-
tions, he was absolutely unable to get the exe-
cutive forces he needed ; they did not exist !
All he could do was the best he could. The
result was that the Ring performances in 1876,
and those of Parsifal in 1882, were by no means
impeccable models; together with much that
was admirable, there were many serious ble-
mishes. And, as years went by, some of the
worst blemishes were allowed to crystallize
into " traditions," while much that was authen-
tically good was more and more forgotten.f
* Remember that sharply-criticised item in his speech at the
congratulatory banquet : "So far have we brought it ; it now
remains for you to complete the work, then we shall have a
German Art ! "
t Lapses even from the standard of 1876 and 1882 crept in
almost immediately. As early as 1884 (under Scaria's stage-
management, too!) the author saw with his own eyes Winkel-
mann- Parsifal do a thing on the stage fit to make Wagner turn in
his grave. After Gurnemanz's first rebuke for killing the swan,
Mr. Winkelmann coolly nodded to someone behind the scenes,
and then, without the faintest attempt at concealment, tossed his
bow off the stage, to be caught in the wings. Der Ungliick-
lie he f as Mr. Carl Armbruster exclaimed, on hearing the story.
176
Wagner
In a word, Bayreuth fell, little by little, into
incompetent hands.
The principle of starting where the original
authority (the composer) left off, and then pro-
ceeding thence in your own way, according to
the dictates of your own artistic sense, is excel-
lent in itself ; upon the whole, the only sound
principle. But, as Captain Bunsby would say,
the virtue of it lies in its application. When
applied by highly cultivated, that is, compe-
tent, professional musicians, it is one thing;
when applied by strenuous amateurs, no matter
how sincere or gifted, it is quite another. And
the trouble at Bayreuth has been that the man-
agement of the performances there has fallen
more and more into the hands of amateurs ; the
thoroughly competent musicians, who knew
what they were about, have been more and
more compelled to quit the field in disgust to
save their own artistic dignity. The practical
upshot of all of which is that the only reason of
being to which Bayreuth can still lay just claim
is that infinite pains-taking, which has never
once been intermitted. If Bayreuth has gone
wrong, it has gone carefully and most labori-
ously wrong. But only in this one matter of
pains-taking can it still stand before the world
as a model.
To take up but one instance of the formation
177
The Opera Past and Present
and perpetuation of a bad tradition, it is worth
noting that the very worst defects of German
singing have been actually raised to the dignity
of an authoritative " school " at Bayreuth. The
world is told, and in no faltering voice, that
a style of singing which Wagner abhorred,
against which he protested, detail by detail, in
his writings, with all the force of his indig-
nant and scornful dialectics, and the direct op-
posite of which he advocated the world is told
that this style is the authentic standard norm
for Wagnerian singing.*
Upon the whole, Bayreuth is no longer a
trustworthy guide. If the world is henceforth
to look anywhere for guidance in the matter of
performing Wagner's music-dramas, it must
look where it always has looked in similar
cases: to competent, educated, and experienced
professional musicians, even though they wear
no " official " badge of authority ; the strenuous
amateur can have no word to say. If the Bay-
* One strongly suspects the advocates of this abominable style
of making a virtue out of necessity. When we hear, for instance,
a man like Mr. Ernest van Dyck openly proclaim it to be authen-
tically Wagnerian, we are reminded of what the late Robert Franz
once wrote of Dr. Philipp Spitta's "Defense" of his harshly-criti-
cised accompaniments to Frederick the Great's flute works: "The
whole scribble is an oratio pro domo, delivered by a thoroughly in-
competent man upon himself ! " Vide also on this head Mr. W.
J. HENDERSON, in The Score for September, 1900.
178
Wagner
reuth idea is ever worthily to be incarnated,
and there can be no doubt that the idea was
very dear to Wagner, it can be so incarnated
only through the efforts of practical musicians,
who know what is artistic and what absurd.
Will it ever be wholly incarnated? Probably
not ; at least, not until all our old social ope-
ratic conditions shall have been destroyed and
reorganized, and a disjointed world set right
in Wagner's way and then Bayreuth's occu-
pation will be gone, for the incarnation will be
universal.
The world accepts an artist's work, not on his
terms, but on its own. 'And, if the conditions
under which it accepts it are inadequate or ant-
agonistic, they can be changed for the better
only by the work itself ; by a better and com-
pleter understanding of it forcing the appreci-
ation and conviction of their inadequacy and
antagonism upon the world at large, and its
rising to the emergency, and curing them.
179
IX
The Development of the Art of the
Opera-Singer
THE opera-singer is at once a singer and an
actor ; herein lies the difficulty of his artis-
tic problem. The difficulty, but hardly the pe-
culiarity ; for, as, ever since the establishment
of the Opera, nearly all the greatest singers of
the world have been opera-singers, that is,
artists whose task of singing was more or less
complicated by the task of histrionic action,
the influence which their example has exerted
upon the Art of Singing in general has been to
a greater or less extent affected (if only medi-
ately, or by ricochet) by the histrionic side of
their professional work. By this no more is
meant than that the great opera-singers, being
both in the majority and in a more prominent
position before the public than the merely con-
cert-singing minority, have at all times set the
standard of artistic singing ; and, in so far as
their own singing was affected by the fact of
their acting, the standard they set must have
been to some extent affected by it, too.
180
The Art of the Opera-Singer
As the Art of Singing, as we now know it,
has been developed mainly on the operatic stage,
one can see that its development must necessa-
rily have gone forward under conditions many
of which were unfavourable, even antagonistic.
Conditions which render the perfect exercise of
any art more difficult than it is in its own na-
ture are nothing if not unfavourable ; and, to the
Art of Singing, histrionic action is one of these.
The easiest situation for the singer is one in
which he has to think of nothing but his sing-
ing, in which he has to make no physical nor
mental effort beside that of singing. The bo-
dily exercise of acting, the mental exercise of
having to deal with musical difficulties, com-
plexities of structure, rhythmic anomalies, or
hazardous intonations, even the mere fact of
having to specialize his expression of the poetic
text, all these place difficulties in the singer's
path. And the opera-singer has always had, in
greater or less degree, to face and conquer one
or more of these. It may even be said that,
ever since the first period of great singing of
which we have any definite knowledge, these
difficulties in the singer's path have been pretty
steadily on the increase.
Taking the arts of singing and of acting se-
parately, and looking at them from the psychical
point of view, we find that the general course
1*1
The Opera Past and Present
of development which the Art of Singing has
pursued has been, either steadily or intermit-
tently, from the comparatively mechanical to-
ward the more expressive, from the apathetic
toward the emotional ; that the general course
pursued by the Art of Acting has been from
the conventional toward the realistic, from the
more or less vivid exposition of character to-
ward the real-seeming impersonation of charac-
ter that is, from mere impressiveness toward
verisimilitude. And both these propositions
hold good with the gradual development of
that combination of the two arts which is the
opera-singer's business. It will be well to bear
this in mind.
Of what the Art of Singing was before 1700
we have no exact knowledge ; we know, to be
sure, that there was the Archilei in 1595 with
her " giri e gruppi" and can surmise that she
was neither the first nor the only one of her
kind ; but of how she sang her flourishes we
know nothing at all. The earliest source to
which the bel canto as we now know it from
singers like Marcella Sembrich, Nellie Melba,
Jean de Reszke, and (alas ! ) too few others has
been authentically traced is the singing-school
founded at Bologna, about 1700, by Francesco
Antonio Pistocchi (1659-?). He and his pupil
Antonio Bernacchi (1690-1756) have commonly
182
The Art of the Opera-Singer
been regarded as the Fathers of Italian singing.
They probably were not quite that ; but, in
lack of earlier documents, one must risk the
"make-believe of a beginning" somewhere.
At all events, it is safe to assume that the Art
of Singing pure and simple, in its most highly
perfected form, what we know as the Arte del
b el canto, originated in Italy. It has been cul-
tivated all over the musical world ; but, wher-
ever it has been cultivated well, it has been cul-
tivated on Italian principles. With a regard
for truth rather than for the amour propre of
other nations, we can take the best Italian sing-
ing as the standard norm.
So it will be well to begin our study of the
history of the opera-singer's art with a critical
examination of Italian examples. Italian sing-
ing has had two great culminating periods, two
zeniths, each of which was illustrated by a
group of great singers ; let us, for the nonce,
confine our examination to these.*
* Of course, to believe contemporary accounts, there never was
a time when the Art of Singing was not going headlong to the
dogs ; neither, to believe the same accounts, was there ever a time
when some few supreme artists had not brought it to a higher
pitch of perfection than it had ever reached before, or would ever
realize again thus making the favoured listener's grandparents
and grandchildren equally worthy objects for pity. But, between
these two contradictory extremes, patient History must pursue her
sane middle course.
183
The Opera Past and Present
The first group is made up of pupils of
Pistocchi, Bernacchi, and other contemporary
teachers.* Note, as significant, that it be-
longs to the Handel, or " Oratorio " period of
Opera, to the period when the Opera had
drifted farthest away from the Drama, when
its music was least dramatic and scenic, and
admitted of the least accompanying histrionic
action ; that is, to the period when conditions
were most favourable to pure singing.
There is no reason for doubting that these
great singers of the Handel period brought the
bel canto to as high a pitch of perfection as has
ever been known, that, in matters of artistic
melodic phrasing and vocal technique (includ-
ing production of tone, command of breath,
pure intonation, and smooth agility of vocali-
zation) they have hardly, perhaps never, been
surpassed. But remember the conditions under
which they sang. " In the days of the Schools
of the Arte del bel canto, the masters did not
have to take truth of expression (T expression
juste) into account, for the singer was not re-
quired to render the sentiments of the drama-
tis persona with verisimilitude ; all that was
* Nicolini (1673-?), Senesino (1680-?), Francesca Cuzzoni
(1700-1770), Faustina Hasse (1700-1783), Caffarelli (1703-1783),
Farinelli (1705-1782), Carestini (1705-?), Gizziello (1714-1761),
Pacchiarotti (1744-?), and others.
184
The Art of the Opera-Singer
demanded of him was harmonious sounds, the
bel canto." * In other words, beauty of vocal
tone and beauty of musical plastics were the
only recognized elements of emotional expres-
sion in singing, beyond that general fervour of
delivery which may best be described as an
absence of apathy ; the emotions themselves
were not to be differentiated, the psychical
character of the dramatis persona was not to be
taken into account, all the singer had to do was
to sing and nothing else.f And, to interfere
with the perfection of his singing, he had little
or no acting to do; at most, a conventional
oratorical gesture or tWo, such as it would
often be more of an effort for an Italian to omit
than to perform. The only item to interfere
with the singer's devoting his whole attention
to his production of tone, melodic phrasing, and
coloratura was a certain undeniable complexity
in the structure of the music he sang; such airs
* VICTOR MAUREL, Dix ans de carrtire, 171. Paris: Paul
Dupont, 1897.
t Let this not seem improbable to the sentimentally disposed.
A noteworthy example of this sort of thing is still fresh in the
memory of the present older generation : Pasquale Brignoli. This
admirable singer never even tried to throw emotion into his sing-
ing, any more than he tried to act ; yet he would often arouse
audiences to the frenetic pitch of excitement, and coolly draw
tears from many an eye by sheer beauty of tone and perfection
of musical plastics.
185
The Opera Past and Present
as Handel's do not quite sing themselves, they
often contain purely musical difficulties, espe-
cially in the relation of the voice-part to the
accompaniment, such as only a trained musi-
cian can master with ease. And the great
singers of this period were, as a rule, good
enough musicians to prevent such musical diffi-
culties being an obstacle to the excellence of
their singing.
The second culminating period of Italian
singing coincides with the Rossini-Donizetti-
Bellini period of Opera in its hey-day, and is
best represented by the group of artists who
sang at the Th6atre-Italien (salle Ventadour) in
Paris in the 'thirties and 'forties of the nine-
teenth century.*
Here we find the conditions considerably
altered. The music is at once more dramatic
and more scenic ; it gives larger opportunity
for differentiating and specializing the emo-
tions, larger scope for histrionic action. The
* Luigi Lablache(i794-i858), Giovanni Battista Rubini (1795-
1854), Antonio Tamburini (1800-1876), Maria Felicita Malibran
(born Garcia, 1808-1836), Giuseppe Mario (1810-1883), Giorgio
Ronconi (1810-1890), Giulia Grisi (1811-1869), Fanny Persiani
(1812-1867), and Marietta Alboni (i823~still living). Alboni
came a little late into the group, in 1847 ; Malibran was the first
to die out of it, in 1836, and Rubini retired in 1843. As another
surpassingly fine representative of the style may be mentioned
Jenny Lind (1820-1887).
186
The Art of the Opera-Singer
old alternation between secco recitative and set
aria has been much modified, and the dramatic
scena invented. The singing- must still be the
bel canto, but great intensity of dramatic stress
of accent is demanded ; furthermore, Rubini
has introduced the vibrato, the full stress of
vocal energy that stops just short of being a
tremolo, or " wobble." The opera-singer of this
period has more to do than his predecessor of
Handel's time : he must sing not only well but
dramatically, he must do at least something in
the way of histrionic action. Yet there is no
reason for doubting that this great group of
singers sang fully as well, in all matters of
vocal technique and melodic phrasing, as the
Handelians did.
How is this to be accounted for? Princi-
pally by the well-nigh child-like simplicity of
the music, and the enormous skill with which
the composers of the period adapted it to the
human voice. In Handel's day, the musical
structure was essentially contrapuntal, that is,
an harmonious interweaving of several interde-
pendent parts (or " voices "), of which the
voice -part was, like the Pope among the
bishops, but "primus inter pares." In singing
music of this sort, the singer has to mind his
P's and Q's, to bear constantly in mind that
what he sings is no independent entity in itself,
187
The Opera Past and Present
but only one strand in a complex fabric ; for the
performance not to come to grief (especially
in the absence of an orchestral conductor),
such music must be sung strictly in time ; only
in free cadenzas and closing cadences can the
singer venture safely upon modifications of the
rhythm. But, under Rossini, Donizetti, and
Bellini, the voice -part had become entirely
liberated from its contrapuntal interconnection
with the orchestral parts. The voice-part was
absolutely and unreservedly "primus" and
there were no "pares" left; the orchestral
parts had resolved themselves into a subordi-
nate accompaniment, the chief object of which
was to support and buoy up the singer. More-
over, the orchestral conductor had come into
existence, and his business was to see to it that
the accompaniment followed the singer, who
was accordingly quite free to take his own
time, commit what rhythmic indiscretions he
found convenient, and so make things easy for
himself. The general structure of Rossini's,
Donizetti's, and Bellini's music is clarity itself,
a clarity " clearer than crystal " ; were it not
for the coloratura, a child might sing it. And,
though this coloratura can be mastered by
nothing short of an enormous vocal technique,
it is in one important respect intrinsically
easier than Handel's, inasmuch as the vocal
188
The Art of the Opera-Singer
" effects " are purely and simply vocal effects,
written with sole regard for graceful and ele-
gant performance by the human voice, and not
in the least influenced by structural considera-
tions. The Rossini-Donizetti-Bellini coloratura
is, for the most part, purely ornamental, a sort
of efflorescence of the melody ; it plays no real
part in the musical development, is not the-
matic, as Handel's is.
It is important to recognize that, in this
period, although the demand for emotional
expression, intensity of dramatic accent, and
at least something of histrionism, made the
singer's task harder and more complicated
than it had been before, these untoward condi-
tions were more than compensated for by en-
tirely favourable musical ones. So the opera-
singer's vocal art suffered no real prejudice.
A comparison of these two great periods of
Italian singing indicates the direction matters
have taken with the opera-singer from Handel's
time down to our own. From then to now, he
has had to face an ever-increasing accumulation
of untoward conditions ; his professional work
has become more and more complicated. From
Rossini's time down to this, the purely musical
difficulties he has had to face have been con-
stantly on the increase complexity of musical
structure, rhythmic complications, hazardous
189
The Opera Past and Present
intonations ; he has had to fight against a more
and more brilliant style of instrumentation,
often pushed to a point where the greatest
stress of vocal effort is required of him, to
make himself heard above the orchestral din ;
more and better acting is demanded of him, he
finds the vague generalities of histrionism no
longer of avail, for these must make way for a
highly specialized, real-seeming dramatic im-
personation; intellectually and physically his
task has been doubled and trebled. Above all,
the sheer nervous tension of situations and
music has so increased as to make due self-con-
trol on his part less and less easy.* The
opera-singer's position to-day is verily no joke ;
he has to face and conquer difficulties such as
the great bel-cantists of the Handel period
never dreamt of. And, to equip himself for
holding his own, as a singer, amid all these ant-
agonistic conditions, it must be admitted that
he has, for the most part, taken little pains.
If ever there were human mortal who, for
the last fifty years or so, had steadfastly refused
* The late Max Alvary once said that, considering the emotional
intensity of music and situations, the constant coSperation of the
surging orchestra, and, most of all, the unconquerable feeling of
the reality of it all, it was a wonder that singing actors did not go
stark mad, before the very faces of the audience, in parts like
Tristan or Siegfried.
190
The Art of the Opera-Singer
to look his peculiar situation squarely in the
face, and size it up wisely for his own artistic
good, that mortal is the average opera-singer.
The one fact that florid coloratura has been
steadily on the decline in vocal writing, and is
now virtually obsolete, has led foolish singers
to believe that the old perfection of vocal tech-
nique is no longer indispensable ; and they have
acted accordingly. A generation after Rossini
and his Italian contemporaries had begun run-
ning away from conservatories before their
musical education was half finished, budding
Italian singers began to imitate them ; the same
has been, to a great extent', true in France also.
And, as for the Germans, they have, for the
most part, but added stronger and stronger em-
phasis to their inborn and carefully nurtured
contempt for vocal technique in all its phases.
Here is a spectacle for the world to gape at :
the spectacle of a race of born and bred musi-
cians, intellectually, emotionally, and poetically
gifted, on the average, far beyond their col-
leagues in other countries, filled with the pro-
foundest love and respect for their art, yet
fondly expecting to do the greatest things in
dramatic singing without even the rudiments
of a special technique that is, absolutely
without the power of doing ! No doubt there
have been, and still are, great German singers,
191
The Opera Past and Present
especially women ; but, when really great, they
have sung in the Italian, not in the German,
way.
The solemn truth and too few appreciate
how solemn is that the opera-singer to-day
needs ten-fold the vocal technique that he ever
needed before. The banishment of coloratura
is but one jot in his favour, all the other condi-
tions are cumulatively against him ; moreover,
their antagonism to pure singing is augment-
ing in an ever-increasing ratio. The old times
when a singer, who did not know a note of
music and could not count four to the measure
to save his life, could yet " sing like a god " are
gone, never to return. The singer of to-day
must be a musician to boot, or he has a sorry
chance of doing great work; but he must also,
and even primarily, be a singer which last too
many are prone to forget.
192
The Present
OINCE Wagner's death, in 1883, the most in-
O teresting fact in the history of the Opera
has been the gradual spread of his influence.
And, in this connection, it may be well to spe-
cify at once exactly what is meant by Wagner's
influence.
Wagner's style, or manner, has, upon the
whole, been little imitated. Some composers,
even among those of note, have at times writ-
ten themes which, without actual plagiarism,
more or less resemble certain Leitmotive in his
music-dramas ; * yet no more than some of Wag-
ner's own recall those of other composers. But
Wagner's themes are, after all, not always so
inveterately individual as his general style
his harmony, modes of development, and musi-
* Some themes in Anton Bruckner's fifth symphony, in E major,
for instance, so strongly recall Wagner that a certain musician
once exclaimed, on hearing the symphony, that it sounded "as if
the composer had been to Bayreuth in too dazed a mental condi-
tion to remember the themes aright."
193
The Opera Past and Present
cal structure ; and this style of his is so abso-
lutely his own that it could hardly be success-
fully imitated, save in the way of parody. If
by Wagner's influence is meant the influence of
his musical individuality, it may fairly be said
to have been null. In this respect, Wagner
has had no more followers than Mozart or
Beethoven ; he has founded no " school." *
But, on the other hand, the influence of
Wagner's ideas concerning the Lyric Drama,
as a form of art, has been very potent and far-
reaching indeed ; and none the less so for being
seldom responded to en bloc. Hardly a com
poser has reflected the influence of all Wag-
ner's principles at once ; some of them seem to
have appealed to one, others to another. The
too commonly applied test the more or less
extensive, use of the Leitmotiv is fallacious;
for hardly a single composer since Wagner has
used the Leitmotiv quite in his way : as the sole
thematic material out of which the musical
fabric is woven. And, as has been pointed out
in Chapter VIII., the merely episodic use of the
Leitmotiv, no matter how frequent, is not essen-
tially Wagnerian. In fine, what is here meant
* Of the few quasi-imitators Wagner has had may well be said,
as Mendelssohn said of the handful of men who tried to write & la
Beethoven in his time : "They clear their throats as he did, and
cough his cough; but that is as far as they get !"
194
The Present
by the spread of Wagner's influence is the im-
mense effect the prime gist of his doctrines has
had upon opera-writing in general since the
publication of Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft and
Oper und Drama, and, most especially, since his
operas and music-dramas have come to be per-
formed outside of Germany. This prime gist
is the abandoning of such musical forms as are
not directly determined by the text and dra-
matic action, and the recognition of text and
action as the sole musical form-determining
principles in the Lyric Drama. Though few
composers have gone to such lengths in the
practical application of "this principle as Wag-
ner, the tendency to apply it less and less
partially has been strongly marked well-nigh
everywhere.
Beside this fact of the spread of the Wagner
influence, two others now claim our attention :
the operatic premiership of Giuseppe Verdi,
and the recent musical renascence in Italy. All
three are curiously interconnected.
As the musical decadence in Italy, which
set in shortly after Cimarosa,* was the result
of over -exportation, with no importation to
counterbalance it, and of a consequent course
of musical in-breeding, no musical renascence
could have come about without a cessation of
* Vide Chapter V., pages 93-96.
195
The Opera Past and Present
these conditions. That the nation should go on
forever as it had been going for well over half
a century was impossible ; that way ruin lay.
That its eyes would, sooner or later, be opened
to the folly of its course was highly probable.
And Italy did at last awaken to a consciousness
of the baneful effects of her long attempt to live
wholly on her own musical resources, almost to
their total exhaustion. About the middle 'six-
ties, Italy began to come to a realizing sense
of having fallen behind in the race for musical
glory. A keen-eyed Chesterfield might have
detected premonitory symptoms of an impend-
ing revolution ; the musical atmosphere was
plainly growing electric, and any more than
usually violent disturbance might produce the
spark, and with it a momentous shock.
The disturbance came in the shape of the per-
formance, under Angelo Mariani, of Wagner's
Lohengrin in Bologna in 1868. Young musical
Italy (or North Italy) felt the shock, and put
on its thinking-cap. The revolution came, its
focus being Milan. As with other revolutions,
its first practical expression was negative and
destructive ; its next, positive and constructive.
Naturally enough, the first bolt of protest
struck Verdi ; from being the acknowledged
crowned head and demigod, he suddenly
possibly to his surprise, but certainly not at all
196
The Present
to his dismay found himself hooted at as the
crying shame of Italian Music as the " hand-
organ man!" But a positive, constructive
movement was at hand.
" Verdi's gleaming star seemed near extinc-
tion, about the early 'seventies. At least, so
said the young Milanese Hotspurs. To be
sure, his last two operas, La forza del destino
and Don Carlos, first produced abroad and after-
wards more or less adversely criticised in Italy,
had been followed by a third, which brought
Verdi's genius fully to light again ; still, the
popularity of A'ida was really not much be-
lieved in in Italy. Verdi had written it for
the then Khedive, Ismail Pasha, for the open-
ing of the Suez Canal and the accompanying
festivities, and had won an enormous success
with it in Cairo. But Milanese musical youth
i progressisti agreed, all the same, that the
Busseto master was completely written out, and
that it was high time for ' another and a wor-
thier ' to come and mount the musical throne of
Italy. The first waves of Wagnerian enthusi-
asm were beginning to swell; a threatening
storm threatening the fragile edifices of mo-
dern Italian Music was blowing across the
Alps, and premonitory revolutionary symptoms
were diagnostically observable. A mutinous,
hot-blooded element, made up mostly of Conser-
197
The Opera Past and Present
vatory pupils in their l storm-and-stress period,'
with the advantage of a solid musical educa-
tion, summoned up all its subtlety to prove
to the astonished older generation that it had
hitherto been the victim of a degenerate musi-
cal Baal-worship, and that all music from Ros-
sini down to his last follower, Verdi, had no-
thing in common with the true, uncounterfeited
Art of Tones ; that the true Evangel was now,
for the first time, preached in the timid at-
tempts to introduce Wagner's operas, and that
everyone's eyes would be opened !
" Bach, Beethoven, and Schumann, who had
hitherto been known only by name in Italy,
especially as regards their larger works, then
formed the firm classical foundation of Milan-
ese musical youth, thanks to an enlightened
body of teachers ; and they thought that, armed
with these weapons, they might fearlessly give
battle to the bear-baiting Philistines. If you
observed the long-haired Conservatory folk in
the streets, you could see that the times were
mightily changed, and that, instead of piano-
forte-scores of the ' ever-young ' Sonnambula,
Nor ma, Lucia, Lucre zia, Trovatore, and Traviata,
they now carried fat volumes of Bach's B mi-
nor Mass, Don Giovanni, The Seasons, Freischiitz,
Schubert's and Schumann's symphonies, Lohen-
grin, and Tannhduser under their arms. Even
198
The Present
Mendelssohn and Spohr were an * uberwundener
Standpunkt ' in their eyes." *
But, when A'ida came to be better known in
Italy, and the Manzoni Requiem was brought
out (in 1874), the " young Hotspurs " found that
Verdi had really been beforehand with them ;
that the new formula, which he had but stam-
mered in La forza and Don Carlos, was here
uttered with unmistakable distinctness, and
that Verdi was surprisingly abreast of the
times ; nay more, that a patient study of Sebas-
tian Bach f had given him a technique such as
need not blush to face any judge in Europe.
Verdi was reinstated on the Italian musical
throne, and, having now doffed his hand-organ
manhood, led the revolution.
When Otello was produced in 1887, it showed
that A'ida had been by no means Verdi's last
word in Opera, and that, notwithstanding the
fact that Wagner's Tristan, Meister singer, and
Nibelungen-Ring had come up in the interim, old
Verdi was still well up with the age. J And,
* Abridged from MARTIN ROEDER, in the Program-Books of
the Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1894-95, pages 54-57-
t Open volumes of Bach's works had long covered the piano-
forte and all available table-room in Verdi's study.
t Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Niirnberg were,
to be sure, brought out in Munich in 1865 and 1868 respectively.
But neither made much headway in the world, especially outside
199
The Opera Past and Present
if Otello failed to convince everyone ot this,
Falstaff (brought out in 1893) carried full con-
viction with it.
In Otello, and especially in Falstaff, Verdi
spoke the newest word yet spoken in Italian
Opera; Falstaff is still miles ahead of his later
followers. Much has been said both affirming
and denying the influence of Wagner ; and it
may be admitted at once that the two men's
styles are utterly different. Verdi is as tho-
roughly Italian as Wagner is German ; but this
is not the point. In Falstaff 'we find the plastic
form of the music conditioned by nothing but
the text and the dramatic action ; and, no
matter what this form may be, this one fact
is, of itself, enough to stamp the formula of
Falstaff as essentially Wagnerian. Moreover,
Verdi has gone to greater lengths in his ap-
plication of this Wagnerian principle than any
other opera-composer before 1893, save Wagner
alone ; * he has even gone to as great lengths
as Wagner himself. Had he not done so, we
of Germany, till after the first and second Bayreuth years 1876
and 1882. Tristan in particular long hung fire with the public.
It will be noticed that Roeder makes no mention of anything by
Wagner later than Lohengrin being studied in Milan in the early
'seventies.
* Mere flashes in the pan, like Adalbert von Goldschmidt's He-
HanthuS (Leipzig, 1884), do not count.
200
The Present
should hardly hear hard-and-fast Shaksperians
(not even making allowance for the difference
between Opera and spoken Drama) call Mr.
Victor Maurel the greatest lago and Falstaff
they ever saw on any stage. Had Verdi's for-
mula not been intrinsically Wagnerian, or his
practice not true to his formula, no singing
actor under the sun could have done in these
parts what Maurel did.
For years Verdi's chief follower in Italy was
Amilcare Ponchielli (born at Paderno Fasolaro,
near Cremona, in 1834; died in Milan in 1886).
Ponchielli died too early to follow Verdi in his
latest direction, as he doubtless would have
done ; he reflected rather the influence of the
works of the master's third period, La forza
del destine, Don Carlos, which influence, in so
far as it was specific, was mainly French. His
creative power was considerable, he was de-
cidedly a man of genius, if of the second rank ;
if he lacked Verdi's vigour of temperament,*
he had a fine dramatic gift, and his technical
musicianship was rather in advance of his day
* In this one respect, Ponchielli fell behind Errico Petrella
(born in Palermo in 1813 ; died in Genoa in 1877), in all others,
markedly his inferior. Petrella was Verdi's most noteworthy im-
itator in his earlier period ; his lone, ossia l> ultimo giorno di Pom-
peji (Milan, 1855) crossed the Italian frontier and even made its
way to this country
201
The Opera Past and Present
in Italy. Of his ten completed operas, La Gio-
conda (the libretto by Arrigo Boi'to ; Milan,
1878) was best known outside of his native
country ; it made the round of the musical
world thanks partly to the music, partly to
Boito's admirable text.
Next to Verdi's latest operas is to be men-
tioned the Mefistofele of Arrigo Boi'to the li-
brettist of Otello and Falstaff (born in Padua in
1842). This work (first produced in Milan in
1868, then, largely rewritten, in Bologna in
1875) already shows a decided advance in the
modern direction over Verdi's A'ida ; there are
scenes in it which anticipate a good deal in
Otello and Falstaff in the way of purely dra-
matic writing.*
Of the latest developments of Italian Opera
little that is definite can be said yet ; Verdi's
last manner is recognizably the model, but this
whole neo-Italian movement is still too young,
too contemporary, to be summed up with any
approach to finality. Probably the man whom
the Italians themselves look upon as their
strongest to-day is Giacomo Puccini (born at
* It is, upon the whole, not easy to determine Boito's place as
an Italian Wagnerian ; since Mefistofele, he has produced nothing,
and Mefistofele reflects the Wagner influence only up to Lohen-
grin. One anxiously awaits the production of his long-promised
Nero to show where he really stands to-day.
202
The Present
Lucca in 1858). After producing several ope-
ras with varying success, he became known
outside of Italy by his La Bohtme (the text after
Henri Murger's play; Turin, 1896); how well
the success of this work has been followed up
by his La Tosca (after Sardou ; Rome, 1900)
it is now too early to judge. Indisputably a
man of no ordinary talent, Puccini can cer-
tainly rank with the best in Italy as a mu-
sician.*
Worthy of mention also, as among the new-
est of the new whose works have crossed both
Alps and ocean, are Nicola Spinelli (born in
Turin in i865)f and Umberto Giordano (born
* Up to 1896, Puccini's career was unduly overshadowed by
the flaming European success of Mascagni and Leoncavallo ; a
circumstance at which Italian musicians of the better class were
considerably scandalized. Not many years ago, the author heard
one of them say : " It is a disgrace to our reputation abroad that
immature and absolutely second-rate talents, like Mascagni and
Leoncavallo, should be taken all over Europe as the foremost re-
presentatives of Italian Music to-day, while solid musicians, like
Puccini and one or two others, are utterly unknown outside of
their native country.
t Labilia (second Sonzogno prize in Milan, 1890, Mascagni's
Cavalleria taking the first) ; A basso porto (first brought out in
German at Cologne in 1894 ; then in the original Italian in several
Italian cities ; then in German in Leipzig, 1899; in English, New
York, 1900 judging from accounts, the most blood-thirsty piece
on record !). Vide Mr. W. J. HENDERSON, in The Musical Re-
cord for March, 1900, page 107.
203
The Opera Past and Present
in Naples in 1869?) ;* but these are too young
for their talent and standing to be estimated at
all.
In Germany no such prominent instance of
surrender to the Wagner influence as Verdi is
yet to be noted. Some few of the younger
men Engelbert Humperdinck (born in 1854),
Eugen d' Albert (1864), Richard Strauss (1864),
etc. have gone rather tentatively to consider-
able lengths in the Wagnerian direction; but
none of them can fairly be said to have fully
made his mark yet in Opera. On the other
hand, a certain pseudo- Wagnerian influence
really nothing more than a Nibelungen influ-
ence has made itself felt at times, in the way
of inciting composers to write series of con-
nected operas ; August Bungert (born at Mu'hl-
heim-on-the-Ruhr in 1846), for instance, has laid
out and partly written a hexalogy, Homerische
Welt, several of the separate "evenings" of
which have already been given.f But, judg-
ing from what accounts have come to this
* Mala vita (Rome, 1892 ; reproduced with great success, as
// vote, Milan, 1897); Andrea Chenier (Milan, 1896; New
York, 1897); Fedora (after Sardou ; Milan, 1898).
t This work consists of two main parts, Die Ilias and Die
Odyssee. The former comprises the operas Achilles and Klytem-
nestra ; the latter, the operas Kirke, Nausikaa, Odysseus Heim-
kekr, and Odysseus Tod. Die Odyssee was finished in 1896 ; Die
Ilias is still unfinished.
204
The Present
country, the serial idea is all that is in any way
Wagnerian in the work.*
The most successful men in Germany have
gone over from Weber to Meyerbeer, rather
than to Wagner ; in Grand Opera of a rather
modernized Meyerbeer type some brilliant
things have been done. In this vein at least
two men have made their mark : Anton Rubin-
stein (1830-1894) and Karl Goldmark (1830-
still living). To be sure, Rubinstein's reputa-
tion as an opera-writer has never been more
than d'estime ; but his Der Thurm zu Babel
(Konigsberg, 1870), Nero (Hamburg, 1879), an d
one or two others have made the round of
Germany, or even crossed the frontier. Gold-
mark's success has been decidedly more ge-
* The serial opera mania broke out with some virulence in Ger-
many shortly after the first Bayreuth year, 1876, but never came
to much in the way of practical results. Mr. Arthur Nikisch used
to tell hair-raising stories of MS. scores of tetralogies, pentalogies,
and even a heptalogy, that were sent in for his approval when he
was conductor at the Leipzig Stadt-Theater (before coming to Ameri-
ca in 1889), "with interlude-music on Leitmotiven all written out
for brass instruments, a la Bayreuth." He said, too, that he was
by no means the only conductor in Germany who had been sub-
jected to this infliction. None of those wonderful scores seems,
however, to have seen the light of the lamps.
After all, the serial idea is not distinctively Wagnerian ; Berlioz
wrote his Les Troyens a serial work, consisting of two connected
operas, La prise de Troie and Les Troyens a Carthage as early
as 1856-63.
20$
The Opera Past and Present
nuine ; his Die Konigin von Saba (Vienna, 1875)
still outranks all but Wagner's operas in point
of popularity and general esteem. His Mer-
lin (1888) was not quite so well received. Still,
Goldmark is unquestionably the most no-
table opera-composer in Germany to-day. It
would, however, be a bold man who should
predict that either Nero or Die Konigin von
Saba would ever work itself into so warm a
place in the hearts of the German people, or
have as long a life on the stage, as Marsch-
ner's Tempter und Judin or Hans Heiling-
both of which are pretty nearly dead by this
time.
If Verdi came to Wagner through Meyer-
beer, this is doubly true of the present French
composers. The progress of Opera in France,
since Gounod, has been marked by a gradual
stretching of the Meyerbeer formula in the
Wagnerian direction. Until very recently it
had not reached the snapping-point ; but it had,
for years, been stretched and stretched until lit-
tle of its original semblance was left. Exactly
how far this or that French composer may have
carried the process is hard to tell. No ade-
quate idea of a modern opera can be formed
from a pianoforte-score ; one must either hear
the work itself, or study the full score. Ex-
ceedingly few modern French operas have been
206
The Present
given in this country ; and full scores are all but
impossible to procure.* Even contemporary
French accounts are confusing ; the term
" Wagnerian " is used very loosely; it may
mean this or that, according to the writer.
Moreover, the French operatic movement of
the last two decades has led to such very new
developments that its true value, even its true
character, can hardly be justly estimated to-
day, even in France.
This much may, however, be plausibly
evolved : that the French have, as usual, been
considerably theory-bound in their operatic do-
ings for the last quarter of a century ; far more
so than the Germans or Italians. Their racial
infatuation for Logic, their profound respect
for a scheme, or plan, have stood much in the
way of their going to work naively and in-
stinctively in their recent musical production.
* Few persons, outside the musical profession, have any idea of
the difficulty of procuring modern opera-scores, especially French
and Italian ones. Publishers hang on to them like grim Death.
Some notion of this difficulty may be formed from the fact that the
full score of Bizet's L'Arltsienne (the first orchestral suite) is not
to be bought to-day for love or money, but only hired. A few years
ago, a French publisher offered a collector note, a collector;
not a conductor or manager twenty-five full scores of modern
French operas for 12,500 francs ($2,500), and would not hear of
letting anything less than the whole collection of twenty-five go !
Even opportunities like this are rare.
207
The Opera Past and Present
Nearly everything they have done has been
done with a fixed intent, and, especially of late
years, have the Opera and Music in general
been to them problems to be solved intellec-
tually. One is almost forced to the conclusion
that no man of really commanding musical
genius has appeared in French Music since
Berlioz ; * no man who, by simply following his
star, could find himself in a new path, without
preconceived plan. No doubt the same may
be said of Germany and Italy ; but neither of
these countries has been so fruitful in brand-new
developments in Opera as France has of late.
Ever since the Wagner influence began to
tell, France has evinced a burning thirst for
progress in Music ; but it has tried to slake
this thirst with pure inventiveness, by seek-
ing to discover new paths with malice pre-
pense, and, as it were, by precalculating ori-
ginality.
Since Gounod, French opera-composers may
roughly be divided into two classes : those who
try to be as Wagnerian as they can, and still
remain French ; those who try to be as pro-
gressive as they can, without being Wagnerian.
* Cesar Franck alone is probably to be excepted here ; but he
does not come within the pale of a history of Opera. Further-
more, Franck was a Belgian ; having, to be sure, many affilia-
tions with the French school, but of un-Gallic, Flemish blood.
208
The Present
One might think these two aims very like two
stools, between which a national Art was in
some danger of coming to the ground. Wag-
ner is, after all, at the heart of the matter ; to
get at the Future by steering round him, or by
working a passage through him and out on the
other side these are the problems that have
occupied musical France for the last two de-
cades, and longer.
Since Gounod died, in 1893, the potentate of
French Grand Opera, the " King of the Aca-
demic de Musique," has been Jules Massenet
(born at Montaud, Loire, in 1842).* Camille
Saint-Saens (born in Paris in 1835) may be
said to run him hard, but has never quite won
his popularity and influence.f Among the
more determined Wagnerians at the Academic
de Musique may be mentioned Ernest Reyer
(born in Marseilles in 1823), Gervais-Bernard
Salvayre (born at Toulouse in 1847) an d Em-
manuel Chabrier (born at Ambert, Puy-de-
D6me, in 1841 ; died in Paris in 1894). J
* Massenet's grand operas have been : Le Roi de Lahore (Paris,
1877), Hfrodiade (Brussels, 1881), Le Cid (Paris, 1885), Le Mage
(ibid., 1891), and Tha'is (ibid., 1894).
t Saint-Saens has produced in Grand Opera : Samson et Dali-
la (Weimar, 1877), Etienne Marcel (Lyons, 1879), Henry VIII
(Paris, 1883), and Ascanio (ibid., 1890).
\ Reyer's Sigurd was brought out at the Acade'mie de Musique
209
The Opera Past and Present
But more interesting than any recent devel-
opments in Grand Opera is the course pursued
by French optra-comique since this eminently
" national " form received its first hard blow
from Offenbach optra-bouffe in the 'fifties.* The
first effect was to throw optra-comique into a
more serious path, thus veiling all semblance
of competition between it and its jaunty young
rival. With Meyerbeer's Etoile du Nord (1854)
and Le Pardon de Ploermel (1859), ^ had already
begun to approach the form of Grand Opera
in extensive musical developments, in reducing
the spoken dialogue to the smallest practica-
ble proportions. This tendency was equally
marked in Gounod's Mireille (1864), Ambroise
Thomas's Mignon (1866), and Georges Bizet's
matchless Carmen (i8;5).t Indeed, Meyerbeer,
Gounod, Thomas, and Bizet brought French
optra-comique as far as regards scheme, or plan
in 1885 ; Salvayre's La Dame de Monsoreau, in 1888; Chabrier's
Gwendoline, in 1893. The latter work was first given in Brussels
in 1886, and has since been given in Carlsruhe (1889), Munich
(1890), and Leipzig (1893, under Emil Paur).
* Offenbach, his works, and imitators form no part of our pres-
ent subject ; suffice it that opera- bouffe did deal opera-comique a
severe blow, distracting public attention from the more "legiti-
mate " form for a time, not only in Paris, but all over France.
t Thomas was born at Metz in 1811, and died in Paris in
1896; Alexandre-Cesar-Leopold (dit Georges) Bizet was born in
Paris in 1838, and died at Bougival in 1875.
210
The Present
up to the level of the larger forms of the
German Spieloper, as treated by Beethoven,
Spohr, and Weber. The spoken dialogue is
the merest indispensable connecting thread be-
tween the musical numbers, which latter occu-
py the first place, and are often developed in a
way, and to an extent, that would do no shame
to Grand Opera.
This direction has been pursued still farther
by Leo Delibes, in his Jean de Nivelle (1880)
and #/#/ (1883) ; Victor Masse, in Une nuit de
Cttopdtre (1885) ; Victorin de Jonci&res, in Le
Chevalier Jean (1885); Massenet, in Manon
(1884), Esclarmonde (1889), Werther (1893), and
Sapho (1897) ; Benjamin Godard, in Dante (1890) ;
Saint -Saens, in Proserpine (1887) and Phryne 1
(1893) ; and, above all, by Edouard Lalo, in his
Le Roid'Ys (1888), which last work probably
reaches the highest level of modern ope'ra-
comique* In some of these operas the spoken
dialogue disappears entirely ; when we come to
*Leo Delibes was born at Saint-Germain-du-Val, Sarthe, in
1836, and died in Paris in 1891.
Victor Masse was born at Lorient, Morbihan, in 1822, and died
in Paris in 1884.
Victorin de Joncieres was born in Paris in 1839.
Benjamin Godard was born in Paris in 1849, and died at Cannes
in 1895.
Edouard Lalo was born at Lille in 1823, and died in Paris in
1892.
211
The Opera Past and Present
the extreme modern men (of whom more later),
we find that this is the rule. The distinction
between Grand Opera and optra-comique is no
longer one of plan.*
If the Wagner influence has been more or less
fruitfully felt everywhere, one reaction against
it or rather against one phase of Wagner's
example is noteworthy. This is the reaction
against what might be called "sea-serpent"
operas.f The writing of exceedingly long ope-
ras was not begun by Wagner; he only out-
did most of his predecessors in that line. The
original sinners were the composers for the
Academic de Musique in Paris, Meyerbeer be-
ing, if not the first, certainly the chief of them.
Opera-goers in this country can hardly have a
notion of the length of such works as Les Hugue-
nots or LAfricaine, when given without cuts ;
even when given as they are in Paris, with far
fewer cuts than here. Wagner excused the in-
* It should be said that the term optra-comique is not used on
the title-pages of many of the more modern works ; the designa-
tions drame-lyrique, or com4die-lyrique t are quite as common.
But it has been thought best, for the sake of simplicity, to retain
the older term here, as indicating an opera written for, and
brought out at, the Theatre de POpera-Comique in Paris. It will
be remembered that, for many years, this term has not necessarily
implied anything of a comic character.
t "Composers nowadays write veritable sea-serpent concertos,
of enormous length ! " HANS VON BULOW.
212
The Present
ordinate length of his Rienzi on the ground of
its having been originally written for Paris,
" for a public that did not take supper." * But
the Meistersinger is fully as long as Les Hugue-
nots (if not still longer), and has no Parisian
excuse to show for it ! And, when we come to
the four days of the Nibelungen, or Bungert's
Odysseus, we have the " sea-serpent Opera " in
its fullest bloom.
The first reaction, or protest, came from Italy
where Wagner's Ring had become sufficiently
known by that time in 1890, in the shape of
Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana. This short
two-act opera, with an orchestral intermezzo
that makes the two acts go at a single sitting,
had what managers call a phenomenal success;
it flew all over Italy and Germany in a jiffy,
and the thitherto unknown Mascagni became
suddenly a seven-days' wonder, the hero of
the hour. The Cavalleria was followed, and
its success capped, in 1892, by Leoncavallo's
* When Wagner used to conduct this opera, as court Kapell-
meister, in Dresden in the 'forties, the first two acts were given on
one evening, and the third, fourth, and fifth on the next.
The French mania for very long theatrical and musical enter-
tainments is verily fit to make one stare ! What think you of this
program of a Conservatoire concert? Mozart's G minor sym-
phony, the whole of Saint-Saens's Deluge (an oratorio in three
parts), and Beethoven's C minor symphony. The author sat
through this, one Sunday afternoon in 1891.
213
The Opera Past and Present
Pagliacci, another work of the same dimen-
sions.*
Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci soon made
the round of the musical world. Of course the
composers were hailed at first as epoch-making
geniuses ; then (though not necessarily of
course) they turned out to be mere flashes in
the pan. Both men seem to have written them-
selves out at the first dash ; for neither has been
able to renew his maiden success.f What at
first seemed genius was afterward found to be
little, or nothing, more than that hap-hazard in-
spiration under which very third-rate men have
at times produced one supremely good thing of
its kind, and then flickered out in their sockets.:):
There can be no doubt that the music of Caval-
leria rusticana and Pagliacci is thoroughly genu-
ine, if not particularly well-written, stuff ; then,
both libretti are admirable in their straightfor-
ward naturalism, though dripping with the rud-
diest of gore.
The success of these two works was so over-
* Pietro Mascagni was born in Leghorn in 1863 ; Ruggiero
Leoncavallo, in Naples in 1858.
t The report that Mascagni wrote the Cavalleria hurriedly, on
the spur of the Sonzogno prize, turned out to be a canard ; the
opera may have been quickly put together, but was largely a pas-
ticcio of music which Mascagni had been years in writing.
\ Rouget de Lisle's La Marseillaise and, in a less degree, Karl
Wilhelm's Die Wacht am Rhein are instances of this.
214
The Present
whelming, moreover, their shortness was so
clearly an element of it, that Germany could
not be long in following the Italian lead Ger-
many, a supper-eating country that could tell
Italy the most pitiful tales of "sea-serpent
operas" interfering with its favourite indul-
gence ! But the blood-curdling atrocities of
Cavalleria and Pagliacci were not to be repeated
by a nation possessed of a sense of humour ; if
Germany was to chime in with Italy's reaction-
ary protest against four- and five-hour operas,
she must at least show the originality of herself
reacting against the sensational blood-thirsti-
ness of the Italian example. So, for carnal ex-
uberance and murder, Germany would substi-
tute the charm of her own Mdhrchen folk-lore ;
a fertile field which Opera had, somehow, long
forgotten to exploit. In December, 1893, n t
quite two years after Pagliacci, Engelbert
Humperdinck (born at Siegburg-on-the-Rhine,
near Bonn, in 1858) came out triumphantly
with his Hansel und Gretel ; which lead was
followed two years later, in 1896, by Goldmark
in Vienna with his Das Heimchen am Herd (the
libretto adapted from Dickens's Cricket on the
Hearth). These two little operas also made the
rounds of musical Europe ; the opera-going
world is awaiting more of the same sort.
Two still newer departures in Opera, and of
215
The Opera Past and Present
quite another character, are to be noted in
France. The first of these was made almost
simultaneously by Alfred Bruneau (born in
Paris in 1857) an d Vincent d'Indy (born ibid, in
1851); it was nothing more nor less than writ-
ing an opera to a prose libretto.* In 1897
Bruneau's Messidor, the prose text by fimile
Zola, was brought out at the Acad6mie de Mu-
sique; it was followed in 1898, at the Ope*ra-
Comique, by d'Indy 's Fervaal, the last word,
so far, of French Wagnerianism, the text in
" rhythmic prose." f In how far this example,
which has certainly something to be said for it,
* Native French composers had long felt the difficulty of fitting
music, with its infinite variety of rhythms, to the regular iambic or
trochaic metre of French verse a matter which gave that Galli-
cized German, Offenbach, no qualms of conscience whatever. As
far back as 1820, Castil-Blaze came out with a pamphlet arraign-
ing composers for the liberties they took with French verse in
their vocal writing ; Berlioz, on the other hand, sharply called the
poets to account for writing verse that was unfit for good musical
setting ; no French poet, not even the finical Racine, making any
bones of an ear-scorching hiatus between the last syllable of aline
and the first of the next, which hiatus would become perfectly ap-
parent in the midst of musical phrase.
tThis "rhythmic prose" is something like what Jean Paul calls
the Streckvers, or blank verse of indefinite length. John Bunyan
falls into much the same vein in parts of his Pilgrim's Progress,
as does also Dante in the Vita nuova. Probably the finest mo-
dern examples of this sort of thing are to be found in Gustave
Flaubert's Salammb$ and La Tentation de Saint- Antoine.
216
The Present
will be followed in future, remains to be seen.
Bruneau has shown himself a come-outer in
other ways, too ; it is to him that the world
owes the conception of the Optra naturaliste, as
exemplified in his LAttaque du Moulin (Opra-
Comique, 1893); a work in which the naturalis-
tic idea does not, however, seem to be pushed
essentially farther than in Mascagni's Caval-
leria or Leoncavallo's Pagliacci.
The other, and newest, departure has just
been made by Gustave Charpentier (born at
Dieuze, Lorraine, in 1860) in his Louise (Op6ra-
Comique, 1900) ; here the composer turns over
an entirely original leaf. Unlike Wagner, who
avowedly made his orchestra give a sort of
running emotional commentary on the action
and incidents of the drama (like the ancient
Greek chorus), Charpentier confines his orches-
tra to a suggestive painting of the milieu, or
surroundings, in which the action takes place.
As the action of Louise passes in the Mont-
martre district of Paris, Bruneau has "put
all Montmartre, all Paris into his orchestra "
hawkers' cries, the tunes played by itinerant
venders on shrill-piping instruments, familiar
street-noises, and what not else. Of what the
dramatis persona themselves are doing, the or-
chestra takes comparatively little heed. This
may be regarded as the last-spoken word in
217
The Opera Past and Present
modern Opera; what weight it may have,
what echoes it may evoke in the future, heaven
only knows.*
* Concerning this Louise of Charpentier's, vide Miss IRENE
DAVIS, in The Musical Record for March, 1900, page no.
FINIS.
18
APPENDIX
PERI'S PREFACE TO EURIDICE
To MY READERS :
Before offering you (kind Readers) this music of
mine, I think proper to make known to you what
led me to invent this new kind of vocal writing ;
since reason must be the beginning and source of all
human doings, and he who can not give his reason
at once lays himself open to the suspicion of having
worked at hap-hazard. Although our music was
brought upon the stage by $ig. Emilio del Cavaliere,
with marvellous originality, before anyone else I
know of, it nevertheless pleased Signori lacopo
Corsi and Ottavio Rinuccini (in the year 1594) to
have me set to music the play of Dafne, written by
Sig. Ottavio Rinuccini, treating it in another man-
ner, to show by a simple experiment of what the
song of our age is capable. Wherefore, seeing that
I had to do with Dramatic Poetry, and must accord-
ingly seek, in my music, to imitate one who speaks
(and doubtless no one ever yet spoke in singing), it
seemed to me that the ancient Greeks and Romans
(who, in the opinion of many, sang the whole of
their tragedies on the stage) must have made use of
a sort of music which, while surpassing the sounds
of ordinary speech, fell so far short of the melody of
singing as to assume the shape of something inter-
221
Appendix
mediate between the two. And this is why we find
in their poems so large an use made of the Iambic
Metre, which does not rise to the sublimity of the
Hexameter, albeit it is said to overstep the bounds
of ordinary speech. Therefore, abandoning every
style of vocal writing known hitherto, I gave myself
up wholly to contriving the sort of imitation [of
speech] demanded by this poem. And, considering
that the sort of vocal delivery applied by the an-
cients to singing, and called by them vox diastematica
(as if held in check and kept in suspense), could be
somewhat accelerated, so as to hold a mean course
between the slow and deliberate pace of singing and
the nimble, rapid pace of speaking, and thus be made
to serve my purpose (as they, too, adapted it to the
reading of poems and heroic verse) by approaching
the speaking voice, called by them vox continuata, as
has also been done by our modern composers (if
perhaps for another purpose) ; considering this, I
also recognized that, in our speech, some sounds are
intoned in such a way that harmony can be based
upon them,* and that, in the course of conversation,
we pass through many others which are not so
intoned, until we return to one which is capable of
forming a new consonance. And, having regard for
the accents and modes of expression we use in
grief, rejoicing, etc I have made the bass move at
* It will be seen that Peri here has in mind that sort of sing-
song which is a prominent characteristic of ordinary Italian
speech.
222
Peri's Preface to Euridice
a rate appropriate to them, now faster, now slower,
according to the emotions to be expressed, and have
sustained it through both dissonances and conso-
nances (tra le false, e tra le buone proporziont), until the
speaker's voice, after passing through various de-
grees of pitch, comes to those sounds which, being
intoned in ordinary speech, facilitate the formation
of a new consonance. And I have done this not
only to the end that the vocal delivery shall neither
wound the ear (as if stumbling in meeting with
repeated chords or too frequent consonances) nor
seem, as it were, to dance to the movement of the
bass, especially in sad or grave passages which
naturally call for others in a more lively and rapid
movement, but also to the end that the employment
of dissonances shall diminish, or conceal that ad-
vantage* which is increased by having to intone
every note an advantage of which ancient music
may perhaps have had less need. And finally
(though I dare not assert that this was the sort of
singing done in the Greek and Roman plays), I have
deemed it the only sort that can be admissible in
our music, by adapting itself to our speech.
For this reason I communicated my opinion to
those Gentlemen ; I showed them this new manner
of singing, and it pleased them most highly not
only Sig. lacopo, who had already composed very
beautiful airs for the same play, but Sig. Pietro
Strozzi, Sig. Francesco Cini, and other gentlemen
* I.e., the advantage of having a bass to sing to.
223
Appendix
well up in the subject (for music flourishes amongst
the nobility to-day), as well as that famous artist
who may be called the Euterpe of our age, Signora
Vettoria (sic) Archilei, one who has always made my
music worthy of her singing by adorning it, not only
with those turns and long vocal flourishes (di quei
gruppi, e di quei lunghi giri di voce\ both simple and
double, which are at all times devised by the activity
of her genius, more in obedience to the fashion of
our time than because she thinks they constitute
the beauty and strength of our singing, but also
with those charms and graces which can not be
written down, and, when written, are not to be
learnt from the writing. It was heard and com-
mended by Messer. Giovanbattista Jacomelli, who
excels in every department of music, and has
almost exchanged surnames with the Violin,* on
which instrument he is admirable. And, for the
three successive years that it was given in Carnival-
time, it was heard with the greatest delight and
received with universal applause by everyone pres-
ent. But the present Euridice had even better for-
tune ; not because it was heard by the Gentlemen,
and other men of worth, whom I have named, and
also by Sig. Conte Alfonso Fontanella and Sig.
Orazio Vecchi, most noble witnesses to my idea, but
because it was performed before so great a Queen
and so many famous Princes of Italy and France,
and was sung by the most excellent musicians of
* He was known as Giovanbattista dal Violino.
224
Peri's Preface to Euridice
our time ; of whom Sig. Francesco Rosi (V), a
nobleman of Arezzo, took the part of Aminta * ; Sig.
Antonio Brandi, that of Arcetro ; and Sig. Melchior
Palantrotti, that of Plutone ; and, behind the scenes,
the music was played by gentlemen illustrious for
nobility of blood or excellence in music : Sig. lacopo
Corsi, whom I have so often mentioned, played a
gravicembalo ; Sig. Don Grazia Montalvo, a chitar-
rone ; Messer. Gio. Battista dal Violino, a lira
grande ; Messer. Giov. Lupi, a liuto grosso. And,
although I had then written it exactly in the shape
in which it is now published, nevertheless Giulio
Caccini (called Romano), whose supreme worth is
known to the World, wrote ,the air of Euridice and
some of those of the Pastore and the Ninfa del Coro,
beside the choruses " Al canto, al ballo" " Sospirate"
and " Poicht gli eterni imperi" ; and this because
they were to be sung by persons dependent upon
him. Which airs may be read in his score, com-
posed, however, and printed after this of mine had
been performed before Her Most Christian Majesty.
Receive it, therefore, kindly, courteous readers,
and, though I may not, this time, have reached the
point I thought myself able to reach (regard for
novelty having been a curb on my course), accept it
graciously in every way. And perhaps it will come to
* Francesco Rasi was a singer attached to Vincenzo Gonzaga
in Mantua ; this, and his taking part in the performance of Eu-
ridice, may account for the Florentine operatic lead being first
followed at the Mantuan court.
Appendix
pass on another occasion that I shall show you some-
thing more perfect than this. Meanwhile, I shall
think to have done enough if I have opened the
path for the talent of others, for them to walk in my
foot-steps to that glory to which it has not been
given to me to attain. And I hope that my use of
dissonances, played and sung discreetly, yet without
timidity (having pleased so many and worthy men),
will not trouble you ; especially in the sad and
grave airs of Orfeo, Arcetro, and Dafne which part
was taken with much grace by lacopo Giusti, a
young boy from Lucca. And may you live happy.
FLORENCE, February 6, 1600.
GLUCK'S PREFACE TO ALCESTE
YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS :
When I undertook to compose the music to Al-
ceste, my intention was to rid it of all those abuses
which, introduced either through the mistaken vanity
of singers or the over-indulgence of composers, have
so long disfigured Italian Opera, and turned the fin-
est and most pompous spectacle into the most ridi-
culous and tedious. I wished to reduce music to its
true function, which is to second poetry in express-
ing the emotions and situations of the play, with-
out interrupting the action nor chilling it with use-
less and superfluous ornaments, and I believed that
music ought to be to poetry what vividness of colour-
ing and well-managed contrasts of light and shade
are to a correct and well-composed drawing, serv-
ing to animate the figures without marring the out-
line. I accordingly have wished neither to stop an
actor where the dialogue is at its warmest, in order to
let the orchestra play a tedious ritornello, nor to hold
him back on a favourable vowel in the middle of a
word, that he may either show off the agility of his
fine voice in a long roulade or wait for the orchestra
to give him time to take breath for a cadenza. I
have not thought proper to pass rapidly over the
227
Appendix
second part of an air, even when it is the more
important and passionate, so as to repeat the words
of the first part the regulation four times, and end
the air where the sense perhaps does not end, to
give the singer an easy opportunity to show that he
can capriciously vary a passage in as many differ-
ent ways ; in fine, I have sought to banish all those
abuses against which common sense and reason have
so long protested in vain.
I have deemed that the overture ought to apprize
the spectator of the action to be represented, and,
so to speak, constitute itself the argument ; that the
cooperation of the instruments should be determined
proportionately to the interest and passion [of a
scene], and that no sharp contrasts between air and
recitative should be left in the dialogue, so as not
to stunt the period out of all reason, nor inappro-
priately interrupt the vigour and warmth of the
action.
I have believed, furthermore, that my greatest
efforts should be reduced to seeking for a beautiful
simplicity, and have avoided making a display of
difficulties, to the prejudice of clearness ; the dis-
covery of a novelty has not seemed admirable in my
eyes, except in so far as it was naturally suggested
by the situation, or helpful to the expression ; and
there is no rule of form which I have not thought
best willingly to sacrifice to the effect.
Such are my principles. Fortunately the libretto
lent itself marvellously well to my purpose ; the
228
Gluck's Preface to Alceste
celebrated author, having imagined a new scheme
for the drama, had substituted the language of the
heart, strong passions, interesting situations, and an
ever-varied spectacle for flowery descriptions, super-
fluous metaphors, and cold and sententious moral-
izing.* Success has already vindicated my maxims,
and the universal approbation of so enlightened a
city has shown clearly that simplicity, truth, and
naturalness are the prime principles of beauty in all
productions of art. Still, notwithstanding repeated
urging from most respectable persons, seeking to
induce me to publish my work in print, I have felt
all the risk one runs in combating such general and
deeply - rooted prejudices, and have found myself
under the necessity of being assured of Your Royal
Highness's most powerful patronage, imploring the
favour of engraving, at the head of my work, your
August Name, which unites the suffrages of enlight-
ened Europe with so much reason. The great Pro-
tector of the fine-arts, reigning over a nation which
has had the glory of raising them up from under
universal oppression, and of producing in each of
them the greatest models, in a city which has always
been the first to cast off the yoke of vulgar preju-
dice, to open for itself a way leading to perfection,
He alone can undertake the reformation of that
noble spectacle in which all the arts have so large a
* Shades of the Camerata! and this is how Gluck treats your
sacrosanct Euripides ! W. F. A.
229
Appendix
share. If You succeed in this, the glory of having
laid the first stone will remain to me, and also this
public testimony to Your high Protection ; for
which favour I have the honour to declare myself
with the most humble respect,
Y. R. H.'s
Most humble, Most devoted, Most obliged
Servant,
CHRISTOPHE GLUCK.*
* This preface is addressed to Leopold II., Grand-Duke of
Tuscany.
230
INDEX
ABT, F., 156
Academic Royale de Musique, 44
Achtbar, roi du Mogol, 43
Adam und Eva, 39
Africaine, Z,', 129
Agnes von Hohenstauffen, 142
A'ida, 1 10, 197
Alboni, M., 186
Alceste, 59, 227
Alessandro Bala, 31
Alvary, Max, 190
Anacrton, 115
Andrea Chenier, 204
Anonyme de Vaugirard, 1', 61
Arbre enchante, L,', 64
Archilei, Vittoria, 19, 20, 224
Arianna, 25, 26
Ariosti, A., 52
Armide, 65
Arnaud, the Abbe\ 61
Arnould, Sophie, 67
Artaserse, 54, 55, 56
Artusi, 62
Ascanio, 209
Ascanio in Alba, 77
Attaque du moulin, L', 217
Auber, 118, 119, 120
BACH, J. S., 198, 199
C. P. E.,140
Balfe, M. W., 53
Ballet-music, 8, 9
Ballo In maschera, /, 109
Baltazarini, see Beaujoyeulx
Banchieri, Adriano, 8
Bar bier e di Siviglia, II, 100, 101
Bardi, Giovanni, 14
Bastien und Bastienne, 83
Bayreuth scheme, the, 172 et seq.
Beaujoyeulx, Balthasar de, 9
Beethoven, i^etseq., 194
Beggars Opera, The, 53
Bellini, V., 97, 102, 103, 104, 105,
106
Berlioz, H., 146, 147, 205, 208,
216
Bernacchi, A., 182
Berton, H.-M., 113
Berton, Pierre-M., 113
Bizet, G., 207, 210
Bohtme, La, 203
Boieldieu, 118
Boito, A. , 202
Bonduca, 52
Bononcini, G. B., 52
Bosio, A. , 99
Brignoli, P., 185
Bruckner, A., 193
Brull, L, 152
Bruneau, A. , 216, 217
Bulow, H. von, 84, 212
Bungert, A. , 204, 213
CACCINI, Giulio, 14, 15, 20, 225
Caffarelli, 184
Caletti-Bruni, see Cavalli
231
Index
Calzabigi, R. de', 57, 58
Cambert, R. , 44
Camerata, the, 12, 15, 16, 18, 22
Carestini, 184
Carissimi, G., 32, 160
Carmen, 210
Castil-Blaze, 123, 216
Catherine de Medicis, 9
Cavaliere, Emilio del, 22, 221
Cavalleria rusticana, 213, 214,
215
Cavalli, F., 28 et seq.
Celler, Ludovic, n
Cesti, M. A., 32 etseq., 160
Chabrier, E., 209
Charles d'Artois, 4
Charpentier, G., 217
Cherubini, L., 94, 114, 115, 119,
120, 141
Chevalier Jean, Le, 211
CM, Le, 209
Cimarosa, D., 92 et seq.
Circe, 40
Circ6, Ballet de la Reine, 9 etseq.
Clemenza di Tito, La, 56
Corsi, Jacopo, 14, 19, 221
Cortez, Fernand, 116, 142
Costa, Sir M., 88
Croce, Giovanni, 8
Crociato in Egitto, II, 125
Cuzzoni, F., 184
Cythlre assilgle, 64
Czar und Zimmermann, 152
DAFNE, 19, 25, 38, 221
Dalayrac, 118
D'Albert, E., 204
Dame Blanche, La, 118, 119
Dame de Monsoreau, La, 210
Danaides, Les, 68, 1x4
Dante, 21 X
Da Ponte, L M 87
Davis, Irene, 218
Deidamia, 54
Delibes, L., 211
Demophon, 115
Der Teufel ist los, 152
Despres, Josquin, 7
Deux journles, Les, 119
Diamants de la couronne, Les,
119
Dibdin, C., 53
Dido and Aeneas, 52
Dittersdorf, K. D. von, 152
Doktor und Apotheker, 152
Don Carlos, no
Don Giovanni, 82, 87 et seq. , 164
et seq.
Don Juan, 90
Don Pasquale, 105
Donizetti, G., 97, 102, 103, 104
et seq.
Dorfbarbier, Der, 152
Doriclea, 30
Dubarry, Mme., 60
Due Foscari, I, 109
Durante, F. , 56, 57
ECHO ET NARCISSE, 67
Eichberg, J., 104
Entfuhrung aus dem Serail^ Die,
152
Ercole amante, 30, 43
Erismena, 30
Ernani, 109, in
Esclarmonde, 211
Etienne Marcel, 209
Etoile du Nord, L , 130, 210
Euridice, 20, 221 et seq.
Euryanthe, 140, 148
233
Index
FANISKA, 141
Farinelli, 184
Faust (Gounod), 133
Faust (Spohr), 139
Fedora, 204
Feen, Die, 153
Fcrnand Cortex, Il6, 142
Fervaal, 216
Festa teatrale della Finta Paxza,
La, 42
Fidelia, 134 et teg.
Finta semplice, La, 77
Fliegende Hollander, Der, 154,
ISS
Fortsch, J. P. , 39, 41
Forza del destine, La, no
Fra Diavolo, 119
Franck, C, 208
Franck, J. W., 39
Franz, R., 178
Freischutz, Der, 140 et seq. , 149,
ISO, 151
GABRIELI, G., 38
Gagliano, Marco da, 23
Galilei, V., 14
Gay, John, 53
German Comic Opera, 151-152
German Romantic Opera, 140 et
seq.
Giasone, 30
Gioconda, La, 202
Gilbert and Sullivan operas, 53
Giordano, U., 203
Gizziello, 184
Gluck, C. W., birth and educa-
tion, 54, 55 ; first opera, 55, 56 ;
travel and literary studies, 57 ;
production of Orfeo edEuridice,
58 ; Alceste, 59 ; visit to Paris,
60 et seq. ; Iphigtnie en Aulide,
6 1 ; controversy with Piccinni,
61 et seq. ; return to Vienna,
64 ; back in Paris, 64 ; Artnide,
Iphigenie en Tauride, and Echo
et Narcisse, 67 ; reforms in
opera, 68 et seq. ; the father of
modern opera, 70 ; character-
istics of his operas, 70 et seq. ;
compared with Mozart, 73 ;
compared with Meyerbeer,
124 ; preface to Alceste, 227
Godard, B., 211
Goldene Kreuz, Das, 152
Goldmark, Karl, 205, 206, 215
Gounod, C., his place in Opera,
132-133 I Faust, 133 ; Romto et
Juliette, 133
Greek Drama, 3, 18
Gretry, 118, 119
Grimm, 61
Grisi, G., 186
Guillaume Tell, IOI, X2I
Gwendoline, 210
HALBVY, J.-F., 131
Halle, Adam de la, 4
Handel, G. F. , 35, 52, 53
Hans Heiling, 151, 206
Hanschen und Crete hen, 152
Hansel und Gretel, 215
Hanslick, .,79
Hasse, F., 184
Hasse, J. A., 77
Hausliche Krieg, Der, 152
Haydn, J., 152
Heimchen am Herd, Das, 215
Henri III. , 9 et seq.
Henry F///..2O9
Herodtade, 209
233
Index
Herold, 119
Hiller, J. A. , 152
Homerische Welt, 204
Horaces, Les, 114
Huguenots, Les, 129
Humperdinck, E. , 204, 215
/LIAS, DIE, 204
Incoronatione di Popped, L' , 25
Individualism in Music, 17 et seq.
Indy, V. d f , 216
lone, ossia I'ultimo giorno di
Pompeji, 201
Iphigtnie en Aulide, 61
Iphigtnie en Tauride, 66
Irene, 40
Italian Opera, 93 et seq.
JACOMBLLI, G., 224
Jean de Nivelle, 211
jfery und Bathely, 152
Jessonda, 139
Jommelli, N., 36
Joncieres, V. de, 211
Joseph, 118
Juive, La, 131
KBISER, R., 40, 41
Konigin von Saba, Dit, 206
Krauss, G. , 99
Kreutzer, K., 152
Kreuzfahrer, Die, 139
Kucken, F. W., 156
LABLACHB, L., 186
Laguerre, 66
La Harpe, 61, 62
Lakml, 211
Lalo, ., 211
Laniere, N., 50
Lehmann, Lilli, 99
Leitmotiv idea, 164 tt seq., 194
Leoncavallo, 203, 213, 2x4
Leopold II., 227-230
Leporello, 168
Lichtenstein, 151
Liebesverbot, Das t 153
Lind, Jenny, 186
Lindpaintner, P. von, 151
Logroscino, N., 37
Lohengrin, 157 et seq.
Lombardi alia prima crociata, /,
109
Lortzing, A., 152
Louise, 217
Lucia di Lammermoor, 104
Lucrezia Borgia, 104, 105
Lully, J.-B., 45 et seq.
Lustigen Weiber von Windsor,
Die, 152
MADRIGAL plays, 7
Mage, Le, 209
Mala vita, 204
Malibran-Garcia, M. F. , 186
Manon, 21 1
Maometto II, 121
Marcello, B., 36
Maria de' Medici, 20
Marie Antoinette, 60
Maretzek, Max, 88
Mario, G., 186
Marschner, H., 151, 206
Masaniello, 120
Mascagni, 203, 213, 214
Masse, V., 211
Massenet, Jules, 209
Matrimonio segreto, II, 92
Medee, 1x9
234
Index
Mefistofele, 202
Mehul, 113, 118
Meistersinger von Niirnberg,
Die, 170, 199, 200
Mendelssohn, 194
Mercadante, S., 97
Merlin, 206
Messidor, 216
Metastasio, 57, 58
Meyerbeer, G., Wagner's criti-
cism of, 123-124; influence upon
the opera, 124 ; compared with
Gluck, 124 ; birth and early
career, 125 ; Robert le Diable,
126 et seq. ; later operas, 129 ;
operatic style, 129-130
Mignon, 210
Mireille, 210
Moise en Egypte, 121
Monsigny, 118
Monteverdi, C., 16, 23 et seq.,
173
Mosl in Egitto, 98, 121
Mozart, Leopold, 76
Mozart, W. A., compared with
Gluck, 73 et seq. ; influence on
operatic development, 75, 76 ;
birth and childhood, 76, 77 ;
death and burial, 78 ; power of
character - drawing, 79, 80 ;
ideality of, 79, 80 ; remarkable
memory of, 81-82 ; method of
composing, 82 ; his various
operas, 82-83 \ his Italian style,
83-84 ; development of the act-
finale, 85 ; his musical formula,
84-86 et seq. ; analysis of his
Don Giovanni, 87 et seq. ; effect
of his work on history of Opera,
91
Muette de Portici, La, 114, 120,
121 et seq.
NABUCCO, 109
Nachtlager in Granada, Das, 152
Nero, 205
Neue krumme Teufel, Der, 152
Nicolai, Otto, 152
Nicolini, 184
Nikisch, A., 205
Nor ma, 105
Nourrit, A., 128, 131
Nozze di Figaro, Le, 87, 88
Nozze di Teti e Peleo, Le, 29, 30
Nuit de Cleopdtre, Une, 211
Nurmahal, oder das Rosenfest zu
Kaschmir, 142
OBERON, 140, 150
Odyssee, Die, 204
Odysseus, 213
Offenbach, 210, 216
Olympic, 116
Opera-comique, 117 et seq.
Optra d'Issy, L\ 43
Opera scores, difficulty of ob-
taining, 207
Operatic singers, early school of,
182 et seq. ; later school, 186 et
seq.; present day difficulties of,
189 et seq.
Opitz, M., 38
Oratorio style of Opera, 34 et seq.,
53
Orazj e Curiatj, Gli, 93
Orfeo, as, 173
Orfeo ed Euridice, 58, 59
Orontea, 32
Orphee et Euridice, 63
Orsini, Maffeo, 105
335
Index
Otello (Rossini), 99
Otello (Verdi), 199
PACCHIAROTTI, 184
Pacini, G. , 97, 102
Paer, F., 141
Pagliacci, 214, 215
Pardon de Ploermel, Le, 210
Parepa, E., 99
Paride ed Elena, 59
Pastorale en Musique, La, 43
Pepusch, Dr., 53
Pergolesi, 37
Peri, Jacopo, 14, 15, 19, 20, 22,
221 el seq.
Perrin, P., 43, 44, 45
Persiani, F., 186
Petrella, E. , 201
Philidor, 118
Philtre, Le, 118
Phrynt, 211
Piccinni, 37, 64, 65 et seq., 67
Piccolomini, Maria, 99
Pistocchi, A., 182
Planche, J. R. , 150
Polyphonic music in Opera, 5 et
seq.
Pompeo, 34
Ponchielli, A., 201
Prd aux clercs, Le, 119
Prise de Troie, La, 205
Prophete, Le, 129
Proserpine, 211
Provenzale, F., 31
Puccini, G., 202-203
Purcell, H., 51 et seq.
QUINAULT, P., 46
RAMBAU, J.-P., 48 et seq.
Reichardt, J. F. , 152
Renaissance in Italy, 12 et seq.
Reyer, E., 209
Rheingold, Das, 168
Rienzi, 153, 154
Rigoletto, 109, in
Rmuccini, Ottavio, 14, 19, 21, 25,
221
Robert le Diable, 126 et seq. , 165
Robin et Marion, 4, 7
Roeder, M., 199, 200
Roi de Lahore, Le, 209
Roid'Ys, Le, 211
Roland, 65, 66
Rollet, le bailli du, 59, 60
Romeo et Juliette, 133
Ronconi, G., 186
Rosamunde, 148
Rossi, L. , 43
Rossini, G., characteristics of his
style, 97 et seq.; his Barbiere
diSiviglia, 100-101; Guillaume
Tell, 121 ; unproductiveness in
later life, 122
Rouget de Lisle, 214
Riibezahl, 139
Rubini, G. B., 186
Rubinstein, A., 205
Ruggiero, 77
Runciman, J. F., 33
SAFFO, 102
Saint-Saens, C, 209, 211
Salieri, A., 68, 114
Salvayre, G.-B., 209
Sammartini, G. B., 55, 77
Samson et Dalila, 209
San Cassiano Opera House, 36,
28
Sapho, 21 X
2 3 6
Index
Sarti, G., 94
Scarlatti, A., 34
Schiavo di sua moglie, II, 31
Schmid, Anton, 63
Schopenhauer, 105
Schubert, F., 152
Schutz, H. , 38
Schweizerfamilie, Die, 152
Seelewig, 38
Semiramide, 98
Senesino, 184
Serial opera mania, 205
Serse, 43
Serva padrona, La, 37
Silge de Corinthe, Le, 121
Siegfried, 168, 169
Sigurd, 209
Sinfonia, 93-94
Singing as an art, 180 et seq.
Singing in Opera, 183 et seq.
Societd del Quartette, the, 93
Sonnambula, La, 105
Spinelli, N., 203
Spitta, P., 178
Spohr, L., 139, 143, 144, 147
Spontini, G., 115, 116, 141, 142
Stabreim, the, 166
Steinerne Herz, Das, 152
Stellidaura vendicata, La, 31
Strauss, Richard, 204
Sylvana, 140
TAMBURINI, A., 186
Tannhduser, 117, 155 et seq.
Tar are, 114
Tate, N., 52
Templer und die Jiidin, Der,
151, 206
Thais, 209
Theatre-Favart, 119
Theatre-Fey deau, 119
Theile, J., 39
Thomas, A., 210
Thurm zu Babel, Der, 205
Tietjens, T., 99
Tosca, La, 203
Traviata, La, 109
Tristan und Isolde, 170, 172, 199
Trovatore, II, 109, no, 198
Troyens a Carthage, Les, 205
UNTERBROCHENE OPFERFEST,
DAS, 152
VALLE, Pietro della, 19
Vampyr, Der, 151
Van Dyck, Ernest, 178
Vaudeville, 4
Vecchi, Orazio, 8
Verdi, G., a new force in opera,
107-108; power of artistic
growth, 108-109 ; various
periods of composition, 109-
no; A'ida, 197; Italian reaction
against, 196 et seq. ; Otello,
199, 200 ; Falstaff, 200, 201
Ve stale, La, 116, 142
Voto, II, 204
WAFFENSCHMIED zu WORMS,
DER, 152
Wagner, R., remarkable mem-
ory of, 82 ; compared with
Mozart, 85, 86 ; earlier operas,
153 ; opera of Rienzi, 153 ; Der
fliegende Hollander, 154-155 ;
Tannhduser, 155 et seq. ; Lohen-
grin, 157 ; attitude toward
operatic conventions, 157 ; un-
dramatic act-finales in early
operas, 158-159; exile and
237
Index
theoretical works, 159 ; Oper
und Drama, 161-162 ; reforms
in operatic writing, 160 et seq. ;
theory of the supernatural in
the Drama, 163 ; theories of the
music-drama, 163 et seq. ; the
Leitmotiv idea, 164 et seq. ;
fundamental principles of his
third manner, 167 et seq. ; the
Ring des Nibelungen dramas,
168 et seq. ; Tristan und Isolde,
170, 172; Die Meister singer
von Nurnberg, 170; militant
character, 171-172 ; craving
for sympathy, 171-172 ; the
Bayreuth scheme, 172 et seq. ;
failure of Bayreuth traditions,
174 et seq. ; imitators and fol-
lowers, 193-194 ; spread of his
ideas, 194-195
Wallace, V., 53
Water Carrier, The, 119
Weber, Aloysia, 77
Weber, Constanze, 77
Weber, K. M. von, birth and pe-
digree, 139-140 ; early operas,
140 ; Der Freischiitz, 140 ; his
influence on German romantic
opera, 140 et seq., 147 et seq. ;
services to the opera, 148-149 ;
characteristics as a composer,
149 et seq. ; influence on Wag-
ner, 154
Weigl,J.,i 5 2
Werther, 211
Wildschiitz, Der t 152
Wilhelm, K., 214
Winkelmann, H., 176
Winter, Peter von, 152
ZAMPA, 119
Zauberflote, Die, 83
Zauberschloss. Das, 152
Zweikampf mit der Geliebten.
ZVr, 139
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gives a bird's-eye view, with many interesting
biographic details and descriptive remarks, of the
whole field of song in the countries of Europe as well
as in America. The volume is especially rich in
anecdotes.
THE MUSIC LOVER'S LIBRARY
ALREADY ISSUED
The Orchestra and Orchestral
Music
By W. ). HENDERSON
With 8 portraits. I2mo, $1.25 net
CONTENTS
I. How the Orchestra is Constituted
II. How the Orchestra is Used
III. How the Orchestra is Directed
IV. How the Orchestra Grew
V. How Orchestral Music Grew
fl "An eminently practical work."
H. E. KREHBIEL, in the New York Tribune.
f " The book is as good in execution as in plan, and should find a
place in the libraries of all who are interested in orchestral music."
Chicago Evening Post.
f "The readers of this admirable book will be fully equipped for
listening intelligently to any first-rate orchestral concert."
The Churchman.
\ " Readable as well as valuable." Brooklyn Eagle.
IN PREPARATION
The Pianoforte and Its Music
By H. E. KREHBIEL
Author of "How to Listen to Music," etc.
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
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